My Boss is a Serial Killer (29 page)

Two things made me decide to go there myself,
though. The first was blind stupid stubbornness. I was pissed off
at the way I was being treated by my so-called employers, and this
felt like a satisfying action to take. The second was that at the
bottom of it all, Bill Nestor was still my friend and still a good
boss, better than any of those jerks back in my “meeting,” and I
thought I could talk him into turning himself in. I’d almost
managed it the day before.

Unfortunately, my reality was stuck here in
the file room, not dashing to Bill’s rescue or thumbing my nose at
Terry Bronk. Hell, assuming I somehow got from here to Suzanne’s
house, nothing said she’d be home or have any idea of Bill’s
whereabouts anyway.

If that were the case, I’d just go home and
watch
Battlestar Galactica
.

Charlene had the same concern when she
returned with the employee address list. “How are you going to slip
by them?” The conference room was directly on the hall leading to
the elevators and stairs.

“
I guess I could try for the back
doors,” I said, doubtfully.

“
They’ll catch you,” Charlene said. “If
you walk that far.”

“
Well, so what if they catch me? There
aren’t any bars on the windows. I can damned well leave if I want
to.” My voice didn’t have as much bravado as I liked. I needed to
be able to leave here as quietly as possible, if I wanted to do
Bill any good.

Suddenly, to my horror, a face appeared at
the end of the aisle, ugly and menacing. The evil troll Lloyd had
found us. Charlene, apparently feeling the cold prickling of his
gaze down her spine, turned and stared at him as well.

He sneered at us. “Want to tell me what’s
going on back here? I thought it was just the file clerks who liked
to hide in these back rows.”

Charlene started to say something, but I
interrupted her, putting a hand to her arm to show it was nothing
personal. I was fed up to my eyeballs with asinine behavior and if
I wasn’t going to take it from Terry Bronk, I certainly wasn’t
going to take it from Lloyd. Even though Lloyd was scarier.

“
I’m in trouble,” I told him, softly
but clearly. “And Bill Nestor is in trouble. I’m trying to get out
of the office without anyone seeing me so I can help
him.”

Charlene looked wide-eyed at me. “Do you know
where he is?”

“
Maybe. I’m not sure.”

“
Where?” asked the scowling
Lloyd.

I looked from Charlene to Lloyd with a heavy
sigh and then finally said, “I’m not sure, but I think he could
have gone to Suzanne’s house.”

“
Makes sense,” said Lloyd.

“
I can’t believe no one else thought of
it,” said Charlene.

I resumed, “But the point is moot if I can’t
slip out of here unnoticed. I can’t get to the stairs or the
elevator without passing the conference room, and there are six
pissed-off administrators in there who would love to fire me. At
the front garage door are just as many cops who possibly don’t have
Bill’s best interests in mind, and I’m in a pickle.”

Rheumily Lloyd stared at Charlene. “What’s
your business in this?”

“
She’s using my car, if that
matters—”

“
Where’s your car?” he asked
her.

“
Um, it’s…” she gestured vaguely in the
air. “On Level P2, by the air conditioners sort of.”

“
Take the service elevator, then,”
Lloyd said, as if this were the most painfully obvious thing ever.
He motioned for me to follow, and I did it because I was too
stupefied to do anything else. He led us through the back stacks,
mostly out of sight from the rest of the office, to the corner of
the file room where the maintenance access rooms were located. The
service elevator was here, and as a security measure, it was
unusable to anyone except the maintenance staff, Lloyd, and his
minions. You had to have a special all-access keycard to even open
the doors.

Lloyd produced said keycard and opened the
elevator for me. I stepped inside, still too shocked to find
words.

“
Remember it’s the red Corolla,”
Charlene said to me, her eyes flicking nervously toward Lloyd, as
if she were standing beside a raccoon that might or might not have
rabies.

I nodded mutely.

“
Think you can help Bill out?” Lloyd
asked me, and I nodded again as the elevator doors began to swoosh
closed. Lloyd said, gruffly, “I always liked Bill
Nestor.”

My daring escapade came close to a crashing
halt in the garage, though, over the stupidest little thing. Full
of smugness for both getting a car and finding a sneaky way out of
the office, I pulled up to the exit, rolled down the window, and
reached for my keycard to open the garage door. But then I
remembered that I wasn’t in my car and that I hadn’t thought to ask
Charlene where she kept hers. I fumbled in the console for a
moment, glancing up to see an eagle-eyed young police officer
watching me intently. He was on the outside, viewing me through the
glass of the fire exit door that was next to the garage door, and I
figured that I had about thirty seconds before he came to ask me
what the problem was. To ask me where I worked. To ask me who I
worked for.

Most of us kept our cards in our cars
somewhere. There were only two or three good places to keep a card.
Okay. Not in the console, not in the glove box. I checked spot
number three, in the sun visor, and felt a wash of relief so great
it dizzied me, when Charlene’s blue electronic access card flopped
into my lap.

As I drove out, the uniformed officer looked
at the license plate of Charlene’s car and then looked briefly into
my face, which I kept half bored, half impatient. He drew himself
up as if he was going to stop me and ask a question—maybe it had
been fairly apparent that I was in an unfamiliar vehicle. On an
impulse, I held up the employee address list that Charlene had
printed for me, and waved it as if it meant something. Good old
rules of looking busy: always carry a piece of paper, and always
look a little worried. The officer waved me through, and I was
outside on the sunny streets of Kansas City.

I knew Suzanne’s end of town well enough to
find her house after one missed exit and a couple of wrong turns.
She lived, as most of us did, on a cluttered residential street of
young trees and exactly-the-same houses. The only thing that
distinguished her putty-colored home from the others was the
godawful long name on the mailbox.

Since it was a weekday morning and still
during the school year, the neighborhood was mostly deserted. A
retiree was out walking his retriever. Nothing else.

I parked Charlene’s car in Suzanne’s driveway
and climbed out, inspecting the house critically for signs of Bill.
Aside from a dead giveaway, like his poking his head out the window
and waving at me, the only other sign I could think to look for was
maniacally neat curtains. But Suzanne had shades, so I saw nothing
except an ordinary house. I had driven all the way out here, so I
might as well give her a knock and see if Suzanne had heard from
Bill. If she actually was sick, she might not know anything about
what had happened, and she could have spoken to him without
understanding the importance.

I went to Suzanne’s front door and rang her
doorbell. On the way here, had I actually been able to bring my
purse along with me, I would have called Gus and told him what I
was doing. A guilty feeling hit me when I missed Suzanne’s exit
that perhaps this little blow I was striking for my self-respect
was counterproductive to the job the police were trying to do. My
lecture from the night before—as nicely as it had ended—actually
did make an impression on me about the importance of communicating
with the authorities. I even reached for my purse to call the
police department before remembering that I’d left it back on the
conference room table.

Brilliant. Not only had I left my purse, but
I wasn’t even in my own car. Why couldn’t I hold onto my
possessions this week? My plans to head home and immerse myself in
Battlestar Galactica,
assuming this adventure didn’t work
out, were for naught because I had to take Charlene’s car back to
her. I sighed deeply, distressed at the minutia of adventure. On
television detective shows, nobody ever had to mess around with
returning cars or losing keys or purses, or finding the stupid
keycard that opened and closed a garage door, or locating someone’s
address and finding the right damned exit off the highway, or
explaining why she ran away from work in the middle of a
disciplinary hearing. On detective shows, they just skip to the
good parts, when all the action and romance happen.

Suzanne answered her door looking terrible.
Normally she came to work with perfect hair and perfect makeup, but
today she was bare-faced and her hair lay flat and unstyled.
Without any grooming, her huge tortoiseshell glasses were all one
could really see of her face. Her enviably long-limbed body, which
always wore pantsuits so well, just looked gangly and mannish in a
gray sweatsuit. But there was something more to her dowdy
appearance than day-off slovenliness. She looked exhausted. She
didn’t even bother to greet me. “Why are you here?”

“
Hey, Suzanne,” I said with great false
cheerfulness. “I was wondering if you’d heard anything from
Bill.”

“
Why do you want to know?”

“
I’m worried about him. No one has seen
him in a couple days…” I trailed off, wondering if it were possible
that she really had no idea what was happening at MBS&K.
“Haven’t you talked with anyone at work? No one’s, um, called you
or anything?”

“
No. I guess since I resigned, no one
feels the need to tell me things. Why should they? I call in sick,
and they just say, ‘Oh, fine, whatever.’ ” She glanced behind
herself and then looked back at me. Flatly she glared at me for
several seconds. There was some inner conflict going on. I had
committed an insult to her, yet she needed me for some reason. And
I understood what it was as soon as she opened her mouth to tell
me. “Come inside. Maybe you can talk him out of it.”

She took me through her house, which was no
bigger than my own but filled with much nicer stuff. Let’s just say
that her dining room chairs would never submit to being painted
apple-green and orange. She had real art on her walls; had spent
time with her wallpaper trim and moldings; and had collected fine
china, brass lamps, good sets of books, and all those sorts of
things that one doesn’t have money to buy when one spends all her
money on DVDs of television shows. Suzanne didn’t comment on
anything that we passed even though I tried to make a few impressed
noises. Complimenting a woman on her house usually seems like the
proper thing to do, after all. She lead me through her kitchen to a
basement door, and down we went into a remodeled, dark-paneled rec
room, complete with a bar and a pool table. And here was where I
saw Bill Nestor.

He looked frightful. Never had I seen
anything like it. For all I could tell, he wore the same suit I’d
seen him in the day before and the day before that, but now it was
quite dirty, with what appeared to be real dirt. He had scratches
on his face and hands. Here was a man who had crawled through a
ditch or a hedge or both, and I doubted whether he’d slept the
night before. I could see that he was caught up hard in one of his
obsessive rituals. He had all sixteen of the pool balls from
Suzanne’s table lined up before him on the felt surface of the
table, all exactly spaced from each other, lined in numeric order
except for the white one which had a place as a “zero,” I guess,
and he was watching them as if they threatened to do something
dangerous.

“
It’s just about time,” Suzanne said,
nodding toward him.

“
Time for what?”

Bill answered my question himself by suddenly
seizing the white ball and hurrying around the corner of the table,
where he placed it in a new spot. He proceeded then to do this with
each other ball, one at a time, until he had them lined parallel to
the long side of the table. This took a couple minutes, and Suzanne
and I watched the whole spectacle with morbid fascination. Once
he’d made the transition, Bill set about spacing them evenly from
each other, and the balls, which wanted to roll, made this a merry
little game for him. Bill looked about as merry as death, but the
balls seemed to be having a good time.

“
He’s been doing this for almost
fifteen hours now,” said Suzanne wearily, “and I can’t talk him out
of it. At three this morning, I took all the balls away from him
and threw them outside into the culvert. He went in and got them,
and he shouted at me not to ever touch them again.”

“
Bill shouted?” I asked.

Suzanne held her lips firmly together and
nodded.

“
You don’t have to talk about me like
I’m not here,” said Bill. “I’m sorry I shouted.”

Suzanne whispered to me, “You’re the big
expert. Fix him.”

“
How did you know I was here?” Bill
asked me, looking up briefly from his work.

“
It was a lucky guess. I couldn’t think
of anywhere else.”

“
He showed up yesterday afternoon,”
said Suzanne, aside, “and asked if he could stay with
me.”

I didn’t want her to elaborate on what that
exchange had been like. Had I been in her place, I would probably
have been overjoyed that a man I truly wanted turned up on my
doorstep, asking for refuge. I suppose I might have maintained some
semblance of that joy until about the fifth hour he lined up my
pool balls, and then thoughts of romance probably started to die
down. Talk about uncomfortable.