My Boss is a Serial Killer (8 page)

Charlene looked no happier about my blithe
attitude. “You know it’s not the first time that he’s had a client
commit suicide.”

“
Who, Bill?”

She did some mental arithmetic. “Oh, yes. But
it was before your time.”

“
Some other client killed
himself?”

“
Another woman, I think. I distinctly
remember Bill’s secretary saying something about a
suicide.”

This I could believe. Charlene had an
excellent memory for what she was told. She and Lucille were my
one-two punch of information. Lucille knew what was happening with
everyone right at the moment, and Charlene remembered everything
that had happened before. Charlene said, “Usually, attorneys make
their secretaries want to commit suicide, but I guess he hasn’t
driven you to that yet.”

“
I thought attorneys made secretaries
want to commit homicide, not suicide.”

Charlene grimaced; this was her version of
laughter. “Maybe you should talk to your detective about it; if he
thinks Bill is driving secretaries and clients insane with boredom,
maybe Bill will be arrested for manslaughter and you can take a
vacation.”

If Bill drove others insane, it wasn’t due to
boredom, I thought laconically. Regardless, though, this gave me an
idea. And I had a long Friday afternoon to get through.

Later that afternoon, I put in a new file
request to Lloyd. I cornered him between two rows of red-ropes.
Red-ropes are standard, legal-length accordion folders that law
firms typically use to hold their files, called red-ropes because
they are sometimes held closed with a red string. Lloyd saw me
coming with a with a pink request slip for yet another file to be
excavated from the basement storage, and started complaining before
I had a chance to speak.

“
You couldn’t have asked for this at
the same time as the other one?” he asked, peering at it with
contempt.

This file request was for the long-buried
records of Bonita Voigt, a former client of Bill’s who had
committed suicide. Charlene had set me on this path of discovery,
but at the time I wasn’t digging in the files because I thought it
odd that two of Bill’s clients had killed themselves, but because I
thought it might be something interesting to discuss with Gus
Haglund, should conversation lag. The field of law is full of
interesting stories, but the field of estate law is not. And my
backup work at present consisted of the screw deposition. I was not
averse to discussing screwing with the detective, but not screws.
And not estate planning. I thought it might be amusing to say, “I
was looking at another file similar to Adrienne’s, and I noticed…”
Well, I didn’t know how to end that sentence yet. I was hoping that
in reviewing the file, I would notice something. Something perhaps
interesting to a detective who was investigating a suicide.
Something that I hadn’t just seen on a television show.

I used a roundabout way to search Bill’s
archived files on the firm’s computer database, looking for the
name that Charlene couldn’t recall, and that way produced results
more quickly than I ever expected. I searched his old saved letter
files for the word “sorry.” Sorry is a bad word for attorneys, who
must never imply that they are wrong, mistaken, or regretful of—or
about—anything. Laugh though you may, I promise you that the word
“sorry” appears so seldom in litigation correspondence that the
only place I found it was in letters to bereaved families that
said, “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

Since Bill has been doing estate work for
over fifteen years, and since much estate work has to do with the
elderly, many of his clients had passed away. I found almost a
hundred archived condolence letters. I eliminated the men, and then
I searched through the women to find the one who hadn’t died of
entirely natural causes. I could do this because of Bill’s closing
memos, which often stated the cause of death. Once I had a list of
dead women’s names, I just searched their files for a closing memo.
As luck would have it, only the second file I searched, Bonita
Voigt’s, was the one I wanted.

The memo, entered some time after the file
had actually been closed, simply stated, “Memo to File: Bonita
Voigt died August 15, 1998. Unfortunately she took her own life.
What a shock for all of us who knew her. She was a very nice woman
and always a pleasure to speak to. I had a good conversation with
her brother about her funeral services…” Bill went on for a couple
paragraphs after that about dates and various conversations that
he’d had. It made me want to look at his handwritten notes, which
would contain all the details, and the only way to do that was to
get Bonita Voigt’s entire file.

And, as I’ve said, people will do just about
anything to amuse themselves at work.

“
Why do you have to have it today?”
demanded Lloyd. “A file that’s this old?”

“
Oh, never mind, then,” I said,
plucking the request slip back out of his hand. “I’ll go get it
myself.”

“
I already locked up storage for the
weekend,” he said, “and if this ain’t an emergency, I can’t see the
point of opening it all back up again.”

I grimaced at him, not sure I believed that
storage would already be locked when it wasn’t even three yet.
“Can’t a clerk just run down and get it?”

“
This is an old file number,” Lloyd
said, pointing accusingly at the slip. “That file’s got to be
almost ten years old.”

“
Yes, it may be about that
old.”

“
Ten years old, that’s going to be
pretty far back.”

What the hell did he mean? Pretty far back in
time? Pretty far back in the storage room? Lloyd would go to any
trouble and beyond any limits to complain. He was probably
disgruntled for both reasons and a couple I hadn’t yet thought of.
It would have given me perverse glee to send him on a particularly
disagreeable mission, if only I could say that it was really for an
urgent matter happening that afternoon. But the age of the file
didn’t support that little ruse.

“
Fine,” I said. “Fine, Monday morning,
then.”

“
So it’s not an emergency?”

I didn’t care for how much he enjoyed saying
that. “Apparently it’s not,” I said dryly.

Then I forced myself to forget about Lloyd.
Other than my irritation with him, I was surprisingly cool-headed
and patient, not anxious in the least about the next day. I had
plenty to occupy my attention that evening. I had my little summer
project to work on, repainting my kitchen chairs in sunshine orange
and green apple, which may not seem offhand like a wise color
choice unless you’re a woman who discovered after a long winter
that everything she owned was brown. Also I had a disk of
Prime
Suspect
to watch.

Gus picked me up right on time, which was
automatically a gold star in Carol’s Little Book of Dating. I
cannot stand tardiness. He’d called me briefly the night before to
confirm my address and a pickup at 12:30 p.m. He also said there
was no need to dress up because we both dressed up all week and
jeans and sandals might be nice for a Saturday afternoon. While we
spoke, I heard other voices and telephones ringing in the
background. Gus was still at work. He kept it short, but he was
polite and hinted at a plan in motion. He said, “I can’t wait,” and
sounded sincere.

Gus Haglund in a pair of jeans is a sight to
make one grateful to be a woman. As soon as I saw him I was tempted
to say, “Just be still, and let me look for a minute,” but I guess
that would have been sexist to my big burly date. What I did say
was, “I’m really glad I bullied you into this.”

As if Gussie could be bullied into
anything.

He took me to his house to meet his
sister.

On the following Monday, I wasn’t going to
start my date-story by saying that. It sounds like the beginning of
a worst-date-I-ever-had story, and that’s not the case. Besides, he
wore a steel-blue T-shirt that made his eyes look like the
treasure-laden depths of the ocean. I was so smitten that I would
have agreed to shear sheep with him, had that been his plan.

We spent the afternoon in Gus’s home where he
very efficiently fixed lunch (steaks, salad, and a strawberry
shortcake). He was waiting for me to be disgruntled about this
arrangement; maybe in the past he had tried this on women who
believed that a first date required more elaborate arrangements.
But I had no room to complain, since I had demanded he ask me out.
And I had no desire to complain, since he was a damn good cook and
since I don’t require elaborateness.

I’m not sure that Gus was consciously testing
me. Still, I had the distinct feeling that my reactions to this
unusually informal first date were being observed. There was the
ghost of an ex-wife involved in all this, I’d bet anything. Either
it was important for me to be unlike her or important for me to be
just like her, but since I’d never met the woman, I just had to
wing it and act like myself.

Gus’s house was like his car. Mid-sized, not
showy. He, like me, obviously spent a good deal time at work and
wasn’t a neat-freak. The bathrooms were clean, which was all I
really hoped for in a guy. Showing me around before the cooking
commenced, he knocked on an upstairs room, and a young woman
answered. I thought, momentarily panicked, that this was his wife?
Daughter? Girlfriend? No, thank heavens. It was his sister Lyvia.
She was not a traditionally pretty young woman; she looked a good
deal like Gus, in fact, and thus had that round-faced, puppy-dog
appearance that had suckered me right in. It was a little less sexy
on a feminine face. But she also had that killer grin, the Haglund
family smile, which I thought there should be a warning about:
People with heart conditions should not see the Haglund family
smile. May cause palpitations and/or pregnancy.

“
I won’t be in your way,” she assured
me. “I have a term paper due, and Gus is letting me use his
computer. So I’ll be in here all day, all night, and probably
through tomorrow and on into Monday morning.”

“
What are you doing a paper on?” I
asked, noting with sympathy that the desk behind her was piled high
with photocopies and library books.

“
Migraine treatments,
ironically.”

We left her to her torment. Gus explained as
he took me back downstairs, “I thought it might make you feel
better, knowing there was someone else in the house.”

“
Feel better?” It actually took me a
moment to plumb the meaning of his words. “I’m not afraid of you,
Gus. Is this a cop thing?”

“
No, not a cop thing.” That made him
shy. “No, you just don’t know me well. And about the first thing I
ever said to you was that I’d killed three of my wives.”

“
Yes. Well, I sort of assumed you were
joking about that.”

“
It is a joke. It’s that Bluebeard
story, remember?”

“
The silly new wife finds the basement
full of heads. Yes, that’s a good one.” I was directed to sit at
the island in his kitchen, and he offered me a glass of
wine.

Gus began to work efficiently in his kitchen.
From his refrigerator he gathered steaks, mushrooms, and the simple
ingredients for a salad. He refused my offers of help. He chopped
vegetables so quickly with the biggest knife I’ve ever seen that I
flinched and gasped a couple times. “In college,” he said, the
knife rapping like a woodpecker down the cutting board, “I worked
in a Chinese restaurant, and they teased me for being too
slow.”

Over the frying pan he said, “I was married,
actually, but only once. And she’s still among the living, if you
can call Omaha living. I have a son named Doug who lives there with
her most of the time. You?”

I confessed very briefly to one previous
marriage and no children. I asked about Doug, which seemed to be
the polite thing to do, but Gus wasn’t ready to share Doug with me
yet. I was shown a picture of a boy around ten built thick and hard
like his father, with a leaner face and green eyes, but the same
curly hair and cupid’s bow mouth. I wondered if the boy was blessed
with the Haglund family smile,. I learned that Doug was Gus’s on
alternate weekends, four weeks out of the summer, and rotating
holidays, and that Gus missed the boy in a constant but bearable
way. “With my schedule,” he said, “It only makes sense for him to
live with his mother.”

That was all I got of Doug that first time
around. That was okay.

“
So tell me about television,” said
Gus, to get the topic away from his son.

“
It’s a box, about so big,” I motioned
with my hands, “and it shows these things called
programs.”

“
You told me that you watch it almost
constantly.”

He remembered something I’d said. Another
gold star. Let’s see, that totaled about five stars thus far, and
we hadn’t even eaten yet.

“
That’s right, I do,” I said, refusing
to be ashamed of my habit, “But I have standards. No reality
television, no game shows, no entertainment-based gossip
crap.”

“
And no lawyer shows.”

Ding. Another star.

“
I won’t say it’s a complete boycott,
but they have to be very good. But you don’t watch
television?”

“
I can’t manage it any more. Now
everything that’s on has long story arcs. You have to watch them in
order, and you can’t miss an episode or you won’t know what’s
happening. My schedule is all over the place. And I can’t stand
missing parts of a story.”