My Boss is a Serial Killer (5 page)

“
We discuss what the individual wants
over the course of one or more meetings. We draft the documents,
review the documents, and make corrections. We have further review
and then a swearing in and signing before witnesses and a notary.
The client retains the original documents; we retain copies and
then send a bill that, hopefully, is paid. It happens about the
same way every time. Some clients come in and change their estate
planning every few months, depending on which of their
grandchildren they like best at the time. Adrienne was not like
that.”

“
When you met with Mrs. Maxwell for
your initial discussions of her will, did you take any
notes?”

Bill almost looked offended by the idea that
he wouldn’t have taken notes. He was a copious note-taker. He could
give a lecture series on effective note taking. From Adrienne
Maxwell’s file I extracted the “Attorney Notes” folder and handed
it to my new fantasy boyfriend.

Gus perused the maniacally organized
materials and asked, “Any rough draft notes, just initial
impressions that you might have jotted down?”

Bill drew himself up indignantly, a faint
frown settling on his forehead. “Those are my draft notes.”

Gus glanced from the yellow paper to Bill and
then back down again. I knew what they both were thinking. Gus was
looking at ruler-straight columns and outline formatting and
thinking that only a cyborg would take notes this neatly. Bill, on
the other hand, was wondering if there were some way to make his
notes neater. Some minutes ticked by as Gus read through the pages.
I enjoyed myself by watching his profile out of the corner of my
eye as I pretended to gaze out the window.

“
She was despondent?” Gus asked,
reading something from the first page again.

“
Hmm?”

“
Here it says that Ms. Maxwell seemed
despondent when she came in for her meetings.”

“
She had lost her husband quite
recently.”

Gus asked, “Mr. Nestor, do you take notes
like this on all your clients?”

“
Of course.”

“
This is pretty intimate stuff. You
have a lot of information here that I wouldn’t think was pertinent,
considering your job.”

“
Is that a problem?” Bill asked, his
fingers beginning to fret together.

“
You’ve got an outline of her home
security measures. And here,” Gus said, gesturing to another page,
“is a list of her personality characteristics, and there’s this
part about being despondent. Depressed. That sounds like something
more from a doctor’s office. Here on this last page, you’ve got a
list of her plans for the future.”

Bill’s breathing sounded rapid to me, and I
hurried to jump to his defense. Detective Haglund, cute as he might
be, didn’t understand how easy it was to upset my boss’s balance. I
said, “Bill takes a great deal of time to get to know his clients,
and he’s an excellent note-taker, particularly in a case like
Adrienne’s. Since she was a recent widow, he wanted to make sure
she was taking care of herself and her possessions. The files are
confidential, so anything he writes would never become public
knowledge. And then, if we have future dealings with the clients,
it’s easier to remember them and what we talked about.”

I looked defiantly at both of them. “Not all
attorneys care enough about their clients to take the time.”

Bill looked rather embarrassed, but he did
seem calmer.

“
Understood,” said Gus Haglund. “Can we
mark these for copies?” He handed the notes over gently. Each time
he looked at me, he smiled fleetingly and flicked his eyes quickly
away, probably fortunate because prolonged gazing would doubtlessly
cause me to blush and drool. I wondered if Gus had a pair of
handcuffs. Would he be willing to demonstrate interrogation
techniques, say, in a private setting with some Barry White music
playing? After the pages were marked, Gus passed the notes to Bill
and asked him to review them, to see if anything unusual struck
him. Bill admitted to having reviewed the notes prior to the
meeting. “It’s standard stuff, Detective. Mrs. Maxwell left the
majority of her estate to her daughter and son, with additional
provisions for her grandchildren.”

“
Mrs. Maxwell had recently lost her
husband when she came to you.”

“
Yes, as I said, she was a new
widow.”

“
I realize this was a long time ago,
but did anything strike you as odd about her behavior? Anything
that maybe isn’t in your voluminous notes?”

Bill took this comment in the good-natured
spirit it was given. “Trust the notes for my impressions. What
about you, Carol?”

I came out of a reverie of Barry White’s
voice singing “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe.”

“
She was depressed, as Bill said,” I
said, sincere and pure as the driven snow in both thought and deed.
“I remember her behaving like she didn’t expect to live much
longer.”

The men stared at me.

“
Sorry if that sounds like assumptions
made after the fact. I do remember thinking that. She wasn’t much
older than my own mother and didn’t seem to be sick or anything,
but she still talked as if she didn’t think she’d live for more
than a few months. I felt sorry for her. I figured it was
grief.”

“
She’s right,” Bill said to the
detective. “I remember that, too; that Adrienne was very sad, as if
she were carrying an invisible weight. Maybe it finally weighed her
down too much.”

To me, it didn’t seem that we did Gussie much
good. My hopeful daydream of being able to provide him with the
clue that solved the case deflated like a leaky balloon. I had no
recollection of Adrienne’s having lurking grandnephews eager to get
their hands on her fortune to pay off gambling debts, nor of
thirty-year-old suicide pacts she had made with a secret society,
nor of threatening letters hand-delivered to her by an obscure
courier service. But all of those things would have been neat. I
imagined Gussie being impressed and grateful, asking if I’d ever
considered being a detective myself.

But I did get to haul him over to the copy
machine. Bill was the one who suggested it. “Take the detective
with you, Carol, so he can make sure he gets everything he wants
from the file.”

That was fine with me. It counted as a second
date.

“
If we don’t stop meeting this way,
people will talk,” I said to Gus as I set out the file to be
dismantled, copied, and reassembled. I caught his expression of
pleasant-enough confusion, as if he were bewildered by my behavior.
Uh-oh, perhaps I was coming on too strong. Some men didn’t like
that. Maybe detectives were too macho—was anybody really macho
anymore?—to like for a woman to flirt. My brain made a rush to
think of an apology, something to do with the early hour and an
antihistamine I’d taken for allergies, but instinct told me just to
be honest with this one. I’d had my share of mind-games in
relationships, thank you very much stupid ex-husband, and this had
given me a sixth sense about good times for cutting to the chase.
“You know, I’d stop making all these insinuating remarks if you’d
just ask me to lunch.”

I began loading pieces of Adrienne’s file in
the machine. I could make copies and talk at the same time with
ease. The copy machine is an excellent place for gossip; all the
secretaries here had learned that trick early on. We could talk as
much as we wanted while copying, without receiving any dirty looks
from the middle-management menace I called Junior Gestapo Brent,
because technically we were still working hard. Two or three of us
could gather and have lengthy discussions about non-work related
topics and maintain the appearance of diligence. Of course there’s
always a chance I’d arrive back at my cubicle with fifty extra
copies of something that didn’t belong to me, but it was all part
of the art of paper wrangling.

The machine’s chugging filled the silence
between me and the man I’d just propositioned.

I said, “Well, my last name is Frank. Get it?
You don’t have to ask me out. Just make up something about it being
against the rules for you to see a case witness on the side.”

“
You’re not exactly a witness,” said
Gus. Was that a good sign? He added, “You haven’t asked me if I’m
single or not.”

“
I’ve been in denial.”

“
Well, I am single at present. I’ve
been married three times, though. My wives keep ending up
dead.”

My hands stuttered briefly on the staple I
was trying to remove, and I didn’t look up. My thought process at
this moment indicated the sorry, lust-stricken shape I was in. I
didn’t think, What happened to all those poor women? but Would I
end up dead if I just took him to a hotel for a couple hours? Then
from the corner of my eye I realized that Gus was grinning.

“
Are you trying to be funny,
Detective?”

“
So, Carol My-Last-Name-Is-Frank,” said
Gus, giving me a more appraising look. “What would happen if I
asked you to lunch?”

“
I would inform you that I’m free every
day from twelve to one, and though that’s a very strict time frame
it’s best for me to adhere to it. If that’s too rigid, most of the
time I have weekends off.”

“
Your boss Bill, he’s kind of
anal-retentive, isn’t he?”

“
He’s obsessive-compulsive six ways
from Sunday,” I replied without any feelings of betrayal. “In a
way, that makes him very easy to work for.”

“
How so?”

“
Predictability is something that a
secretary can appreciate.” I tried to find a way to explain this.
“There’s a code word for certain types of bosses among clerical
people: ‘detail-oriented.’ This is a nice way to say that someone
is a nit-picking pain in the ass. A psychotic sadist I used to work
for called himself ‘detail-oriented’ which meant that he didn’t
feel any qualms about shouting at people for whatever detail he was
oriented on at the moment. Bill is detail-oriented, but he’s always
detail-oriented in the same way. Figure out the details and
everything else is smooth sailing. And he has never shouted at
me.”

“
I’ve heard a saying that God is in the
details.”

“
The way I heard it is that the devil
is in the details,” I countered. “Personally I believe the more
important issue is whether Carol My-Last-Name-Is-Frank is in the
details. I’m very good at what I do.”

I handed him a stack of copies from the file
of Adrienne Maxwell and said, “It doesn’t have to be lunch,
either.”

I hadn’t been on many dates since my divorce.
Well, let’s be honest. I had been on five dates since my divorce.
These had, all five, been nice times spent with nice enough guys,
but nothing I wanted to pursue. I had a bad feeling about men for a
while there, even lost interest in sex; I had to recover.

Throwing myself into work was one way to get
on with my life, especially since at about the same time I escaped
from a bad marriage I had also escaped from the psychotic sadist I
worked for and got a good job working for Bill Nestor. But throwing
oneself into work is a terrible way to meet guys. At least it is at
MBS&K. Same office, day in and day out, working mostly among
other women? They’re happy to set you up, if you would like to go
out with their husband’s little brother who just got out of prison
after a four-year sentence for drug possession, or with their nice
friend from church who is still in love with his ex-wife but is
willing to take you out if you’ll hear his testimonial about the
saving power of Jesus.

The men at MBS&K were married, attorneys,
married attorneys, or unmarried attorneys (Bill) who are unmarried
for a reason (obsessive-compulsive six ways from Sunday), or they
are Lloyd. Besides, and you know, forgive me if this all gets too
Freudian, I had the secretarial tendency of mistakenly equating my
boss with a husband and/or child. Honestly I don’t mean that in
sexual terms. There wasn’t any of that sort of thing between me and
Bill. I only mean that, if you’re a simple sort of woman, and you
work for a man who really needs you, not just professionally but
emotionally, the whole relationship takes on the feel of a
marriage.

A lot of women have an internal nurturing
mechanism that makes us want to take care of people, and yet there
are limits to just how much care you wish to give. Bill was a
handful. Outside of work, it didn’t seem that taking on another
nurturing burden was a good idea. During the past three years
whenever I encountered a potentially attractive guy, I would find
myself thinking, “Yeah, but with Bill, and all…” as if he were my
child and I had to make sure any new stepdaddy would love him as
much as I did. It sounds nuts, but be patient with me. I had
survived a stupid ex-husband and the psychotic sadist boss, so my
quasi-intimate relationship with Bill was actually the best of the
three.

Most of the time Bill’s clients came to us
but sometimes he had to go to them, if a client was infirm or
hospitalized, for example. More than once, we’d gotten a call from
someone about to undergo surgery who decided that he or she didn’t
like the set-up of their durable power of attorney or their living
will, and we’d embark on a field trip to go make the necessary
changes. Bill used to take Suzanne Farkanansia on these excursions
but by now he only took me, ha
ha
. Another point for me in
the great office contest of who-does-Bill-like-most, not that I
kept track or anything. That would be childish.