My Boss is a Serial Killer (30 page)

I announced, to Suzanne, but loudly enough
that Bill could hear me clearly, “Bill is wanted for questioning by
the police. That’s why he asked you to hide him, and that’s
probably why he’s stuck over there playing a game of pool with
himself. I tried to get him to have a meeting yesterday—”

“
Meeting is a code word,” said Bill
with an unpleasant glimmer in his eyes, even though he wouldn’t
look up from his game.

I replied, “Yes, well, now that you’ve run
off like a guilty man, it’s probably a code word for throwing your
ass in the slammer. But doing it in the most dignified way
possible. Is that okay with you?”

“
What in the hell are you talking
about?” Suzanne demanded of us both.

“
The police want to speak with Bill
about the death of Adrienne Maxwell, is all,” I told
her.

“
Why? Do they think he killed
her?”

“
Well, Carol does,” said Bill. He just
about had the line of balls where he wanted them, and now it was
time to stand back and watch them to make sure they didn’t go nuts.
He said, “She wants me to turn myself in for causing nine of my
clients to kill themselves.”

At this point Suzanne must have decided to
stop asking questions. She folded her arms, pursed her lips, and
didn’t look at either of us specifically.

Bill put his hands to the edge of the pool
table and glared at the balls. I knew what was going on here: the
same thing that always happened to Bill when something in his life
scared or overwhelmed him. Escapism is a human trait. Some of us
drink; some of us turn violent; some of us retreat into fantasy;
some of us watch a lot of television; and some of us, or at least
one of us, became obsessed with some kind of ritualistic behavior
that closed out the possibility of any other coherent thought. I
wasn’t blind to the comfort in what he was doing. When the world
surrounding him threatened disorder, he took comfort in creating
extreme order in a very confined way.

If I wanted to talk to my boss, I had to
break him out of this.

“
What’s the matter with the balls,
Bill?”

“
I can’t stand the sound they make when
they clack together.”

“
But they don’t clack together unless
someone is playing with them.”

“
No, but they could. All it takes is a
vibration through the floor, a breeze going through the room,
something bumping against the table. Then they clack
together.”

He didn’t elaborate further, but I knew there
was more to it. For example, he could not bear the thought that he
might leave this house altogether and these shiny colored balls
would be left to their own devices, free to clack and clack and
clack. Like the details of a murder investigation, these pool balls
might come together and make noise.

I went to stand beside him, surveying the
line of balls. “Would it work if we put them each in a different
drawer or something?”

“
I tried that,” said Bill. “I put them
on those shelves, one to a shelf. They wouldn’t be still.” He was
referring to the shelves across the room where Suzanne had an
impressive assortment of collected exotic beer bottles, board games
and sports-related memorabilia, and he meant that the balls
wouldn’t be still in his mind, no matter how perfectly still they
might be on those shelves.

“
What about pressing them all together
tightly, like in a sack?”

He visibly shuddered. “No, no, that’s…that’s
even worse. They rub together and make this sound.”

“
And what about Suzanne’s idea, of
throwing them out?”

He shot Suzanne a very dark look, which
caused her eyes to widen in anger and her lips to press more
tightly together. She was one of those women who get more and more
quiet, the greater her anger becomes.

“
Okay, then.” I studied the problem for
a minute, trying to think of how to keep these balls from mocking
my insane boss. When Bill broke his pose to reach for the white
ball, ready to begin forming a new line around the next corner of
the table, I stopped him with an upraised hand. “Wait,” I said.
“Let’s play Twenty Questions.”

“
I can’t. It’s too awful.”

“
Bill!” I said in exasperation, but he
was already off and running, and Suzanne threw her hands up in fury
and stalked up the staircase, stomping her feet as loudly as
possible.

But she was back a moment later, saying, “Did
you actually bring the cops with you, Carol?”

I hadn’t heard many more welcome words in my
life. No, I hadn’t brought them, but I could see easily enough what
had happened. Charlene had done the smart thing and told someone my
idea and where I was headed; she had done what I should have done
before stepping in here.

“
Where are they?” I asked.

“
Parked outside and heading for the
door.”

On cue, Suzanne’s doorbell chimed through the
house, and Bill, pausing in the middle of his ritual, put his hands
to his face and rubbed violently.

“
Okay, go answer it,” I told Suzanne
calmly, “and stall them for just a couple minutes.”

“
Stall them!” exclaimed Suzanne. “What
am I supposed to say?”

“
Anything except that Bill is down
here.”

My boss peered at me from between his
fingers. “I thought you wanted me to turn myself in.”

“
I do. And you’re going to. But not
like this. We’re going to do this the right way, not with you
freaking out about pool balls in the basement. You’re going to walk
upstairs and politely agree to go wherever they want you to
go.”

“
I can’t; I can’t…”

The doorbell chimed again, and Suzanne turned
to hurry back up the stairs.

I called after her, “Tell them I’m here. Tell
them I’ll be up in just a minute. Say I’m in the bathroom or
something.”

The bathroom was my big excuse for the day.
Hadn’t I already used it a couple times? Bill, more shaken and
desperate than ever, plunged back into his ball-lining ritual. On
an impulse, I raced upstairs after Suzanne.

In her kitchen, I searched hurriedly through
her cabinets. I could hear her in the living room, speaking to the
police officers at the door. I figured I had maybe two minutes to
fix Bill’s craziness. This crap was definitely not in my job
description, and I’d have felt entitled to a pay raise if not for
the fact that I had probably been fired.

I found what I wanted in the fifth cabinet
I’d searched—shortening. I grabbed the can, relieved to discover
that it was nearly full, and hurried back downstairs. Bill watched
me in horrified fascination as I tore off the lid and began
scooping handfuls of shortening out on the pool table—Suzanne was
going to hate me for this. Then I took the balls in my
grease-covered hands and stuck them in the shortening and then, as
best I could, buried them in the stuff until I had sixteen mounds
of shortening surrounding sixteen colored balls. I’ve tried to
think of a simile to describe what this looked like, but for the
life of me, nothing in the world looks like sixteen pool balls
stuck in sixteen mounds of shortening. And really, nothing
should.

“
That’s gross,” said Bill. “That’s
going to ruin the felt.”

“
Will you just, please,” I said slowly,
staring at my shortening covered fingers, “please, just let me do
my job, Bill?”

Now that I’d ruined his game, if one could
call it a game, he said, “Carol, I just want to go back to
work.”

“
I’d like that too. Though I don’t
think I actually have work anymore.”

“
What happened?”

“
We don’t have time to talk about it
right now. Right now, what you have to do is let me take you
upstairs.”

“
So I can be arrested for causing women
to kill themselves.”

“
Well, I think that’s what they believe
has been happening.”

“
Even though I never laid a hand on
anyone.”

“
If you’re innocent, Bill, just say so.
Give them an alibi. Give them the information they
need.”

“
But you said,” Bill hissed, “you said
the evidence was overwhelming. That everything pointed to me.” He
paused and stared up at the ceiling as if doom awaited him. “I
tried so hard to find a way that it wasn’t my fault. As soon as you
showed me that list, I knew something was terribly wrong and I just
hoped it was all in my head. That’s why I sent you to the
library—to find the proof that widows kill themselves. That there
wasn’t anything I’d done to cause it. I never tried to lie to you
or distract you, Carol, honestly. But it all just pointed back at
me, didn’t it?”

“
Only if you look at it all in a
certain way.”

“
I don’t have alibis. I don’t go
places. I don’t know people. I don’t have anything to prove I never
hurt anybody.”

I put my hands on his shoulders and made him
look at me and fully focus before I spoke again. We stared eye to
eye as footsteps clomped overhead. They were coming to get us.

“
I believe you,” I said to my boss.
“Overwhelming evidence be damned.”

Bill drew back, straightened his shoulders.
He didn’t look unburdened, but he did look better. “Thank you,
Carol. That means a lot.”

There were voices at the top of the stairs,
two I did not recognize and one that I did.

It was Gus. He said, “Carol, are you down
there?”

“
Yes, we’re here. Bill and I are both
here. There’s nothing to worry about. We’ll come upstairs together
now.”

“
Great,” said Gus’s voice from above.
“As you’re doing that, I think you and Mr. Nestor should both keep
your hands where we can see them.”

“
Yes, sir,” I said, and I nudged Bill
on the arm. Bill called up, “Yes, Detective.”

“
When you get up there,” I said softly
to Bill, “and when you talk to them, don’t start in with your spiel
about somehow causing their deaths. Your actions do not cause
people to be murdered, Bill. I know you like to believe in the
synchronicity of all things, but the police are looking for a
confession and that sounds like one.”

Anxious as he was, he managed to smile
self-deprecatingly. Yes, we both knew how he could get. We mounted
the stairs together, and I kept my hands where they could see them,
covered with shortening. I got some very strange looks from
Suzanne, from Gus, and from the two officers who had come to the
door with Gus. I recognized them. They were the two who had sat
guarding my house the night before.

They did not handcuff Bill. Nor did they read
him his rights or anything else that I had come to expect from my
vast television experiences. Gus told Bill that he was being asked
to come voluntarily to the police station for questioning in
connection with the suicide deaths of a formidably long list of
women. I got the idea that if Bill refused or made a fuss, warrants
and arrests might come into play, but Bill looked exhausted,
defeated. He agreed meekly to go with them.

“
Detective Haglund,” he said, on his
way to the door, “I’m sorry about yesterday and avoiding our lunch
meeting.”

“
Our lunch meeting?” Gus replied,
raising his eyebrows.

“
Code word,” Bill said, of course not
making much sense to anyone but me. “Anyway, when something causes
me stress, I tend to react badly by engaging in ritualistic
behavior. I’m not fully under control when that happens.

I wished Bill would shut up about his mental
problems in front of these three police officers. I saw glances
exchanged among them. And what’s worse, I could see what came next,
after Bill got into an interview room, like the little
claustrophobia-inducing cell I’d been imprisoned in the day before,
and after they started coming at him with questions about dead
clients. Would they be able to control the resulting Bill Nestor
brand of insanity? I said, rather too loudly, “Maybe I should come
along. To see if there’s anything I can do to help.”

Gus stepped between me and the door. “Not
this time. We’ve got this under control.”

I looked up at him beseechingly. He was so
handsome when he got stern. He had on a very nice jacket that day,
light summer linen in navy blue that made his eyes turn that dark
oceanic color. I wanted to go to the station almost as much to be
with him as to protect Bill. But there was no reason for me to be
there, and the police didn’t let people come to interviews just
because they wanted to.

“
I can help,” I insisted, knowing it
was pointless.

“
Carol,” said Gus with a patient sigh,
“this is really twice now that you’ve overstepped your bounds and
put yourself in possible danger.”

“
Danger!” exclaimed Bill and Suzanne at
the same time in the same incredulous tone.

Gus ignored them. “And though I appreciate
your situation, you’ve got to back off. We will be in contact with
you when we need your help again.”

“
Hey, now,” said Bill, from the front
door of Suzanne’s house. “There’s no need to bark at Carol about
this. This is my fault, for panicking yesterday. All she’s done is
tried to be a good secretary to me.”

That remark, kind though it was, made me feel
like a first-class heel. I looked over Gus’s shoulder (not an easy
task, even on tiptoes) and said, “No, it’s my fault it’s happening
this way, Bill, and I’m sorry I didn’t handle it better from the
very beginning.”