My Boss is a Serial Killer (17 page)

Personally I thought she had romantic
feelings toward Bill, an absolutely asexual creature who had never
married and never expressed interest in sex of any sort that I knew
of. Maybe Suzanne chose him as an object of affection because he
was so safe. And maybe it’s also why she responded so sourly to the
good relationship I had with him. Romantic jealousy, of all things.
Women can build up powerful fantasies about the men they want, and
Suzanne had been at the firm for almost as long as Bill. She’d even
disposed of a husband—I mean, lost a husband, geez, what an awful
thing to say—during the time she’d worked here.

I could see the scenario in my mind. Suzanne
worked with Bill for a few years, got to know and trust him, but
married someone else whom she lost to that accident. And this was
husband number two, so she had a bad track record in the husband
department. In the aftermath of her grief, she refocused her energy
on safe, reliable Bill and possibly saw him as husband number
three, until along came this new secretarial bimbo Carol Frank.
Thinking that Bill and I shared some romantic bond was utterly
preposterous, but if Suzanne was looking for an excuse for why Bill
wasn’t offering her dinner-and-a-movie, I suppose I was as good as
the next.

I heard Suzanne in Bill’s office, whining
when he told her that I’d be postponing the screw deposition a
little longer because he was sending me out for an assignment.

“
I’ve been waiting on that screw
deposition for a week and a half,” she tattled.

“
If it’s that important,” Bill told
her, patient as ever, “maybe you should send it to the word
processing department or make some time to do it yourself. I’m sure
they’d approve the overtime for that client.”

This wasn’t what Suzanne wanted to hear, of
course. She didn’t want anyone but me to do her mind-numbing grunge
work because that ensured that I knew my place. It was her
tremulous iota of power over me.

Suzanne sighed as if the weight of the entire
world bore down upon her. Did they know that I could hear them
clearly? I’m not sure. Most of us tend to think our conversations
are more private than they really are. Truth is, in an office,
there is no real privacy. Suzanne said, “No, I don’t trust word
processing to do a good job, and I’m just too busy. If it’s
important, Bill, maybe I should go to the library for you. I am
your paralegal.”

“
That’s all right. I want Carol on
this.”

She tried to argue again, under the guise of
doing it for the good of the firm, but Bill interrupted her,
thanked her, and invited her to leave. He was polite about it, and
I hugged myself with guilty pleasure. Suzanne drove me nuts with
her high-and-mighty and mostly imaginary power. She harrumphed by
my desk as I was gathering my things, saying, “Listen, that place
is very complex. If you have trouble, you should call me. I can
walk you through it.”

“
Thanks, Suzanne. I think I remember
how to use a library.”

Her eyes glittered behind those big
tortoiseshell glasses. “What case are you researching, anyway?”

“
Sorry, I can’t really say.” I was all
sincerity on the outside, and on the inside I was feeling the
joyous smugness that one can really only feel in a hollow victory.
Women are so weird sometimes, and I am no exception.

“
Oh, it’s a secret mission.” Sourly she
appraised me. “You’re just Bill’s little go-to girl, aren’t
you?”

That was an insulting thing to say, even for
office workers who don’t like each other. Her words weren’t the
problem so much as the tone in which she said them, which implied
that I was Bill’s little sex slave in addition to being his little
go-to girl. For heaven’s sake, there’s a code of conduct to be
followed among staff. You can’t say things like that to someone you
have to look at every day. I raised my eyebrows to her in surprise,
honestly perplexed as to how to respond. She, too, seemed to
realize that she’d stepped over a boundary.

She backpedaled by becoming extremely polite.
“Let me take this deposition off your hands.” She took the tome
from the corner of my desk. “Since you’re busy doing other things.
I’m sure word processing can take care of it just fine. They’re so
good at completing grunge work.”

KU had a nice medical library. Nice, I mean,
in its quiet, cheery orange atmosphere, bright skylighted
staircases, and numerous comfortable chairs. I assumed it was also
nicely appointed with medical literature—but how the hell would I
know? Seems like a bad idea for a medical library to be
half-stocked with quack materials but, hey, budgets have to be cut
somewhere.

Just as a side note, a medical library’s copy
room is a fun place for a secretary to be, because the medical
students jam the machines and descend into mad idiotic ravings.
It’s a sweet feeling to be able to approach them and fix their
problem with a few impressive tweaks of the green release levers
inside the cogworks. I appreciate the fact that a brain surgeon can
be flummoxed by a copy machine. Copy machines bow before my skills.
I reason that they contain a fourth and possibly a fifth dimension
in their depths; all you have to do is reach in and grab. I have
dug paper out of places it was never meant to be.

But libraries are treacherous too, if you go
there with a vague idea of what you want to research but no
specifics. Bill said to look up things that pertained to my
discovery. I was there for four hours before I realized that I
wasn’t even sure what my discovery was.

I left the library at three and went home
early. I had a big stack of copies that I could pretend I was going
to review, although I wasn’t going to do any such thing. I still
had Nowhere Man to watch, and when that was done, Season Three of
MI-5. Season Two had ended on a cliffhanger for which I couldn’t
imagine a resolution; I was anxious to see the tricks they employed
to explain it all.

Spending the day doing something I was not
accustomed to doing had tired me. My brain felt drained from
processing information, none of which seemed valuable. I shouldn’t
have gone to the library in the first place, not without a good
notion of what I wanted. I found many articles about
physician-assisted suicide and the great debate surrounding it, and
many articles about the importance of early diagnosis of elderly
depression as a way to circumvent the rising elderly suicide rates.
But nothing about these bare, dirty facts of mine: I had a list of
names, of similar women who had killed themselves, and is that
normal?

Medical researchers don’t like to say what is
normal. They like to deal with statistics, which don’t say what is
“normal” but what is “average.” And they didn’t talk about what I
wanted to know.

Maybe I should ask Gus, I thought. Or maybe I
should just talk to Bill first. I hated to go back to Bill with
this voluminous amount of paper that told us nothing valuable.
That’s pretty “normal” for legal research, but this was a special
project, specially assigned by him and specially given to me. I
hated that thought that Suzanne Farkanansia might have done a
better job.

“
You’ve been busy!” said a tremendously
impressed Bill. He was no dummy, but he too could be fooled by
large stacks of paper. Large stacks of paper, of course, always
look more productive than little stacks. I had about five hundred
pages of copies to sit before him on Friday afternoon. He went
through the articles, read titles, and made happy noises and
murmurs of interest. It was all baloney. I gave him what I’d copied
yesterday, not wishing him to think that I’d been slacking at the
library, but only six pages told me anything that seemed relevant.
At the local library that dealt in novels and magazines—not the
medical library, not the law library, not the Institute of Nuclear
Physics, I had managed to find a Surgeon General’s information
article about suicide in the elderly.

I showed this to Bill and admitted as much.
“All the rest just seems like distraction.”

He didn’t think so. Of the Surgeon General’s
report, he said, “Well, this is just generalities, really.” He
turned his attention back to the medical articles.

“
Keep it, though.” I was alarmed that
he seemed on the verge of tossing it into recycling. “After you
pore over those snore-fests from the Massachusetts Doctor’s Club or
whatever, you’ll start to see it. The pattern I found in those
women doesn’t seem to have much to do with medicine. Or with normal
suicide patterns. Look, see?”

I had his attention again but he didn’t seem
happy about it. Maybe he thought the Surgeon General dumbed things
down too much, for the sake of the common slob. Medical journals
were more impressive. Lawyers don’t really like to hear any opinion
that isn’t spoken by an “expert.” Still, I pointed at a few things
I’d highlighted in the Surgeon General’s report. “Women are less
likely than men to kill themselves. Women in their age group are
very unlikely to commit suicide, even if they are widows. Suicide
is most common in men over age 85, and then in young people and
teenagers.”

“
Carol, Carol.” He took the report away
from me like a parent removing something harmful from his child’s
grasp. “I’ll read it, I promise. I only meant that a list of
generalities about suicide doesn’t further our cause as much as
solid research.”

“
The Surgeon General isn’t exactly some
uneducated schmuck writing editorials. It’s not only a person but
an office of the government, Bill.”

“
Point taken. I wasn’t talking down to
you.”

“
I know that. I’m just trying to save
you a little time. Those medical articles are beside the point.
Twelve years of research to tell us conclusively that people are
more likely to kill themselves if they’re depressed or terminally
ill? Well, um, yeah.”

Thinly Bill laughed at my impatience. “I’m
going to review these materials this weekend and maybe make some
calls. I want you to head home and take it easy. You look a little
worn out.”

I wasn’t worn out. I had a slight headache
from library work, and maybe I was feeling a bit frustrated, but I
wasn’t worn out. I had the oddest feeling that I was in trouble for
something. Bill seemed distracted and unhappy.

“
Carol, go on home. You look absolutely
drained.”

I gave it one last hopeful try. “Are you sure
we don’t have any work here to finish first?”

“
Oh, no, no, no.”

“
Okay, well, promise me that you’ll
look these things over carefully.”

He promised me.

“
You’re not angry at me, are you?” I
asked, deciding I didn’t want to spend the weekend wondering about
that.

Quickly he answered, “No. Goodness, what a
silly question.”

“
You seem agitated, though.”

“
Oh, this.” Bill made a broad gesture
at all the paperwork I’d brought before him and then at my
legal-pad list of dead women. “It’s worrisome.”

“
Why?” I wanted to know.

“
Oh, you know me. I worry about things.
Crazy things that never end up actually happening.” He said again,
“You know me.”

“
I know that when you worry that way,
you usually get stuck in a ritual, and then I have to come snap you
out of it. Is that going to happen?”

Bill raised his eyes to me, and though I had
been half-joking, he was not. But he tried to sound as if he were,
and that was surprisingly creepy. In a tone of such weird lightness
that I barely recognized it, he said, “Don’t worry. I won’t call
you at midnight on a Saturday again. Go on home, Carol.”

“
Go on home,” he said again as I backed
out, leaving him to watch the almost useless pile of materials I’d
brought to him about suicide.

Suzanne Farkanansia caught sight of me and I
heard her voice wafting over a few cubicles. “So how was the big
research trip to the library?”

“
Fine,” I called back, continuing on my
way out the door.

She was long-legged and caught up with me.
“You were out for quite a while. It must have been pretty
productive.”

“
Eh.” I shrugged.

“
Did you learn anything interesting?”
she asked. When I hesitated, she said, “Oh, that’s right. It’s a
big secret. You’re not supposed to tell anyone about it. Just
between you and Bill.”

“
Well it’s just not that big of a
deal,” I tried to explain. “Not nearly as interesting as it
sounds.”

“
Does it sound interesting?” questioned
Suzanne. “I wouldn’t know. What’s so interesting about it? What
could your buddy-bear Bill have you tracking all over town
for?”

“
Oh, stop it,” said a third voice, and
I turned to see Charlene emerging from her cubicle. “God, Suzanne,
quit pestering her. It’s confidential, obviously.”

Suzanne glowered at Charlene. “Hello? Is
anyone talking to you?”

Charlene wasn’t susceptible to sarcasm; that
kind of thing went right over her head. She said, “There’s no
reason to pick at Carol because you’re unhappy with your job.”

“
Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it?
Because my job is no longer my job. Carol seems to be happy to do
my job and doesn’t spend a lot of time doing hers.”

Raised voices in one corner of an office
cause dead silence in all other corners; everybody was listening to
this exchange and I wished I could crawl under a desk and hide.
Since, as an adult, it was unseemly for me to hide, I raised my
hands in a placating gesture to the two women. “Hey, it’s nothing
to get upset over. I just—”