My Boss is a Serial Killer (32 page)

Still my doubt must have showed, particularly
because I didn’t think that newspapers were much for printing
details of quiet and unspectacular suicides. I’d discovered that
much in my own research. Charlene looked pointedly annoyed with me.
“Obviously I heard it from somewhere, Carol.”

“
And so, how long before you started
thinking that something was strange about it?”

“
Well after two or three I thought it
was strange, but it wasn’t until your detective showed up, after
Adrienne’s death, that I began to worry that Bill was really doing
something wrong. So I just, sort of, suggested that it might be
something to look into.”

“
Why me? Why not just say something
yourself?”

Charlene gave a tired little sigh. “I don’t
like office politics any more than you do, but I know how they
work. I couldn’t afford to lose my job. I’m too old to get a really
good new position, and I’d never be able to get the same benefits
and pension.”

I felt positively wounded. I actually took a
step back from her, as if she’d tried to slap me.

She said, “You’re young. You’ve only been
here a couple years. I thought you could cope better with it than I
could, you know, if this sort of thing happened.”

“
That’s just super. You set me
up.”

“
Oh, stop it. That sounds like TV
talk.”

“
I think I’m entitled to a little
melodrama. I think I’m entitled to a little help from you,
too.”

“
No, I can’t.”

“
I promise I’ll leave your name out of
it. I have so far.”

“
This is going to be hard enough on the
firm without me putting my nose in the middle of it. The firm will
need people like me to be the backbone.”

“
Wow, your devotion to the firm is an
inspiration.”

“
You’re not hearing me. I believe Bill
is probably guilty. They’re his clients. He’s the only one who
makes any sense.”

“
No. It doesn’t make sense. I’ve gone
through this all in my mind again and again, and it’s not logical.
Just listen to me for a little bit.”

She leaned forward and peered at me. “Carol,
you’re not, maybe, in love with him or something, are you?”

“
He’s my boss and my friend. Suzanne is
the one who is gaga over Bill, and frankly I wouldn’t be surprised
if she was the one offing all the attractive widows who come to his
door.”

“
Hey, come on.” Darkly Charlene
frowned. “That’s not funny. Don’t say things like that, not about
someone you know.”

“
Think about it, Charlene. We’ve got a
string of suspicious suicides all connected by this firm. Bill’s
not doing it, I’m sure of that, so someone else must be. Almost
seventy people work here—though only a handful have worked here
long enough to account for all the deaths.”

“
Stop it.” Charlene looked almost
disappointed in me. “I don’t feel comfortable listing my coworkers
and deciding which ones are capable of crimes.”

“
Well, I’m sorry. Excuse me very much.
Ordinarily I don’t come to work and try to pick out the one guy
who’s likely to start a shooting spree—though that would be
Howard—”

“
Oh, yes, Howard would.” Charlene
nodded vigorously.

“—
but now my boss Bill is in trouble,
and I can’t help but consider the other possibilities. And
Suzanne’s one of them. She’s got the seniority and the
motive.”

“
Motive! What motive?”

“
She’s jealous of Bill’s time and
attention. What was it she said about rich women parading in here
flashing their money? You were there; you heard her.”

“
I’d forgotten about that. So you
really think that’s enough of a motive to murder people? I can see
maybe one killing in a jealous rage, but then, these suicides are
different. Whoever’s doing it obviously has some greater purpose
than something as silly as jealousy over a man. That’s a small
motive, and this looks like a big motive, like there’s a real
meaningfulness behind it that we don’t understand.”

She had a good point, and I was not overly
surprised that she knew so much. People must have been talking a
lot yesterday. I admitted, “The motive—the method—of the entire
scenario escapes me, to be honest. How in the heck do you talk a
reasonably healthy and financially secure woman into killing
herself with no fuss?”

“
Just because they might be healthy and
wealthy doesn’t mean they don’t want to die.”

“
Well I find it hard to believe that
all nine of them were so clinically depressed that it only took a
phone call to convince them. I can’t think of any way to do it
except at gunpoint.”

Charlene’s eyes widened. “That’s not so. You
could threaten the widow, let her know that you’d kill her family
or something if she didn’t cooperate.”

“
I guess that might work, for some
people, but I doubt you’d get the same neat, clean suicide-look.
The widows would leave a note for someone, a warning or a message
of some kind.”

“
Not if they were despondent enough,
they might not…”

“
Despondent?” I repeated, remembering
the word from Bill’s numerous notes. “Despondent still, two or
almost three years after their husbands are dead?”

“
There’s no time limit on
grief.”

“
Are we even talking about the same
thing? These are not suicides. Nine widows didn’t just sit down on
a Saturday night and eat over-the-counter meds until they went to
sleep and died. Even if there’s no trace of foul play or evidence
that anyone else was there, I can only see this working at
gunpoint. And frankly—because my last name is Frank, you know—I
only see it working if a woman is the one holding the gun. Thus,
Suzanne.”

The gaze Charlene directed at me was cool and
decidedly not amused. “Explain.”

All right! Time to put my minor in philosophy
to work and exercise the old logic skills. I began, “Um, okay. The
unsub—that’s unidentified subject—goes to the widow’s house. She
confronts the widow, with a gun, and says something serious but not
life-threatening, like, ‘I’m going to rob your house because I need
money for my dying mother’s operation,’ or something of that ilk.
Then she says, ‘I want you to take this handful of sleeping pills
so that I don’t have to tie you up,’ and she says, maybe, ‘I don’t
want to have to hurt you.’ You know, makes it the lesser of two
evils. And she probably says either that the pills are mostly
harmless or that she’ll call an ambulance from the payphone down
the street, as soon as she’s done robbing the widow’s house. But no
ambulance ever gets called because the entire point of the exercise
has been to make the widow overdose. For whatever motive. I don’t
know why.”

Charlene, to my surprise, looked near tears.
Resentfully she asked, “Why does it have to be a woman?”

“
Well because,” I stated. This was
obvious enough to me. “Because if it were a man, the widow wouldn’t
be so willing to quietly knock herself unconscious. Would you want
a man drugging you until you were helpless? I’d sure as hell put up
a fight; I’d make the sonofabitch shoot me. That’s what I’d
do.”

“
I suppose it makes some kind of sense.
But I still think it’s just as likely to be Bill doing it.” In
response to my perplexity she said, “Because it’s Bill, they know
him, and they trust him. He’s their lawyer.”

“
No, doesn’t work. The widow can’t know
who her attacker or see the face, because otherwise she wouldn’t be
willing to take the pills. The widow would figure, ‘I’ve seen the
criminal’s face and can identify her, so if she knocks me out,
she’ll kill me afterwards.’”

Charlene said, “Then it has to be Bill.”

“
God! Why?”

“
Because there’s no sign of a break-in
or, what do you call it, unlawful entry. He’s the only one who
could be getting in undetected.”

I hadn’t thought of that and, in the face of
my prideful logic, her argument mortified me. She had made another
excellent point. Bill was the one who took the notes on their home
security systems, their spare keys, their watch dogs or lack
thereof. Bill was the only one who knew those things. Bill, and me,
I guess.

Or—and here my spirits lightened again—anyone
else who read his notes. I felt like a dolt. Of course, anyone who
read his client notes would know that information was in there.
Conversely, anyone who had never read Bill’s notes would not know
that information was in there. It was in that moment, when I made
that logical leap, that it occurred to me that I was standing in
the storage room with the serial killer.

You know, it was not just the fact that
Charlene was aware of the content of Bill’s client files. That
alone would not have convinced me of anything. Anyone who worked in
this office could open Bill’s files and read them, if she wished to
bore herself silly. Yet this fact, accompanied now by a rush of
other information my detective-show-educated brain was compiling,
decided me against her. Charlene had been with the firm long enough
to account for all the deaths. Charlene was a woman, duh, and I
found no flaw in my logic on the point that our killer was probably
female.

But more than these circumstantial logistics
was her backstage pushing of me towards discovering the pattern of
deaths and blaming it on Bill. It seemed to me that a person who
suspected serial murder, as she claimed she had, would not wait
years to say something about it merely out of fear of losing a job.
The police get anonymous tips all the time. Charlene had, just five
minutes ago, told me that it was only when Gus showed up at the
office, investigating Adrienne Maxwell’s death, that she’d decided
something had to be done. Seemed to me that panicking at the sight
of a detective was the action of a guilty conscience.

But mostly, I think the thing that damned her
was when she used the word “despondent.” It’s not a patented word;
you don’t have to have special permission to use it, I understand.
Yet she had used it, and it was Bill’s word, and I saw what was
standing right before me.

I think Charlene knew her own truth just a
fraction of a second after I had discovered mine. Something in my
eyes, I don’t know—Bill had seen the same look the day before, when
I’d considered the possibility that he was guilty. And now, just
like yesterday, I felt sad and mystified and a little out-of-sorts,
but not especially fearful. This was Charlene, my friend. Imagine
this if you will: crimes don’t sound quite so criminal when they
are committed by someone you like. Or perhaps that is what happens
to a woman’s judgment, when she watches too much television.

“
Charlene,” I said, with concern. “Oh,
you poor thing.”

“
Save it for Bill,” replied Charlene
wearily. “I don’t need nurturing.”

“
It’s the despondent thing, isn’t
it?”

She looked genuinely surprised. “How did you
know that?”

“
Code word,” was all I could think to
answer. I was unable to stop myself from asking, “Why are you doing
this?”

Her shoulders slumped, and her voice dropped
even lower. “I don’t even remember how it began exactly. But what
I’m doing is right. Happy marriages are so rare. When they end
because of death, there shouldn’t be anyone left behind. I wait for
them. I give them some time to see if they can find someone else to
love, but true love doesn’t come around that often, so I help them
to not suffer any more. It’s like
Romeo and Juliet
.”

It really wasn’t, and I didn’t think it fair
to Shakespeare to pull him into this fiasco. That was a beef that
could wait for another time, though. I said, “What I meant was, why
did you push me to find out about it? You know you could have gone
on meting out your own brand of romance indefinitely. No one knew
about it.”

“
Your detective was going to find out.
Your detective came here. No one else has ever gotten anywhere
near, except for years and years ago at the hospital.”

“
The hospital?”

“
But I fixed that problem, and I could
keep helping here, where the widows came. And I could help end the
good marriages and the bad marriages, too.”

I didn’t suppose Aven Fisher knew about this
alternate side to his practice of domestic law. I had a terrible
impulse to laugh, but I held it in. This was probably not the best
time for uproarious chuckles. Charlene caught the near-hysterical
twitch at the corner of my mouth and told me, “You’ve probably
never seen how beautiful it is, and how brave it is, for a woman to
die when she loses the man she loves. The women in my family were
never afraid to do the right thing. My grandmother wasn’t. And when
I was very young, my mother—”

She stopped herself and peered at me hard.
Perhaps I’d looked a bit too interested in this. Succinctly she
finished, “It’s the right thing to do. I’m helping.”

Charlene was too intelligent to believe that
I’d wholeheartedly agree with this, so I did not pretend to do so.
I said, “Charlene, you have to know that you’re not helping anyone.
You’re hurting a lot of people. Otherwise you wouldn’t be trying to
pin the blame on someone else.”

“
What the law says is right and what I
know inside to be right are two different things—and the law and
everyone else doesn’t see any difference. You don’t,
obviously.”

“
What I think doesn’t
matter.”