My Boss is a Serial Killer (13 page)

“
I’m his secretary,” I said,
bewildered. “What’s the matter with him?”

“
I don’t know. I don’t know at
all!”

A secretary has to set her limits,
particularly with a man like Bill. Going to your boss’s apartment
at almost midnight on a Saturday is outside the boundaries of
acceptable expectations. But his landlord had tugged at my
sympathies. I could tell from the stress in her voice that she had
gone to some lengths with Bill already and was calling me as a last
resort.

I found the building easily, an antiseptic
and personality-free concrete stack on the outskirts of an affluent
suburb. I’d seen the place before and assumed it was offices. I
parked, as the landlord had instructed, in the underground garage
and rode an elevator up to the lobby, where I found Bill and his
landlord alone, looking out the window.

“
Are you Carol?” she asked hopefully.
She was about Bill’s age, a very big woman in both length and
breadth, with beautiful, flaming curly red hair. Her hair belonged
on a movie star. The rest of her was raw, pink and blobby. Her
elevated blood pressure flamed in her cheeks.

Bill turned and looked at me with surprise.
I’d never seen him outside the office before that night but I
wasn’t surprised to find him wearing his gray suit pants, white
oxford and tie, just as if he’d been working all day. The lobby,
which would not have been out of place in a college dorm or
hospital ward, was fronted by dark glass windows and he was
fretting in front of them. He either had nothing to say to me or
simply couldn’t find words, because he shook his head in
desperation and turned away again.

Hmm. A puzzle for Carol. I asked the landlord
to describe exactly what the problem was, my implication being that
having Bill want to stand in the lobby all night long shouldn’t
matter, since he wasn’t hurting anything. What she described
sounded familiar enough. He was having one of his episodes.
Something was bothering him outside. Throughout the day, he had
paced here. Several times he strode outside to the gutter and
checked something. She did not know what. Often he got down on his
knees—which I noticed were very dirty—and looked into the storm
drain. Bill was a good tenant, a nice man. She’d tried to talk him
out of his ritual, but nothing worked.

“
Why don’t you go to bed?” I asked.
“I’ll take it from here.”

The landlord rushed from us in utter relief.
She promised various things, that she’d check on him the next day
or whatever, but I paid little attention.

“
What’s the matter?” I asked, standing
next to Bill and peering into the black night. “What’s kept you in
the lobby all day? What’s out in the gutter?”

It wasn’t the best start. Probably he’d
already been asked these questions a hundred times, and he didn’t
feel capable or responsible to answer them.

“
Hey,” I snapped at him. “Look at
me.”

He did as requested.

“
I’m standing in your lobby at midnight
on a weekend in my pajamas. This is outside my job description.
Tell me what the heck you wanted me for, or I’m lodging a complaint
with Donna on Monday morning.”

“
She wouldn’t leave me alone,” he
whined about his landlord. “She kept insisting that she had to call
someone. I couldn’t think of anyone else. I just wanted her to
leave me alone, that was all.”

“
She probably figures you’re her
responsibility, since you live in her building. I didn’t even know
you lived in an apartment.”

“
Yes.”

“
But you’ve always told me things about
your house,” I argued.

“
It was just a figure of speech,” said
Bill. “Like you might call your cubicle an office.”

“
Did you not want me to know you lived
in an apartment? It’s nothing to be ashamed of.” I was trying to
distract him from the problem in the gutter. I tried to think of
reasons why apartment living would suit Bill. “You don’t have to
care for a lawn, which is messy work. You have a more manageable
space. You don’t have to do your own repairs, usually.”

“
I like the floors here.”

“
Are they all like this?” I indicated
the awful flat tiles beneath our feet. “Looks like this used to be
some other kind of building. Little offices, maybe? And they
converted it when the population boomed around here?” I was
guessing, but I was probably right, too. Housing was pricey in this
part of town and much in demand.

“
I just liked the hard
floors.”

“
What’s out in the gutter,
Bill?”

“
Leaves. They’re falling
everywhere.”

“
It’s autumn, Bill. That happens every
year.”

“
They’re getting in the gutter out
there.”

“
Every year,” I reiterated. “Why is
that worrying you?”

“
If the gutter clogs, the rainwater
backs up.” It was not raining. It was not supposed to rain anytime
soon. I didn’t even bring it up because an argument like that was
not relevant to Bill. He said, “When rainwater backs up, the cars
driving through it could hydroplane. There can be accidents and
wrecks. People injured. It could be a mess out there.”

“
If leaves pile up in the
gutter.”

“
Those trees across the street are
dropping thousands of leaves, and they’re all landing in the
gutter.”

That much, at least, was absolutely correct.
“Have you cleared the gutter?”

“
I’m trying to keep it clear. But every
time I go out, there are more leaves. And I don’t know where they
are coming from.”

“
They probably blow down the street
from other trees in other yards. You do realize, Bill, that you’re
having one of your episodes?”

“
I know.” He pressed his forehead to
the glass of the window. It would leave a slightly oily print there
when he raised his head again.

“
And that any number of things could
clog a gutter or cause a car accident, and you don’t have any way
to control them all?”

“
I know.”

“
Come on with me; let’s go look at the
gutter together.”

That was how I ended up standing in a gutter
with Bill at midnight last autumn, as we inspected the tendency of
the fallen leaves to bank themselves against the curb.

“
Let them sit for a minute,” I told
him. “Let’s see what happens.”

It was not easy for him to let them sit. The
ritual was that he could let them sit while he watched from the
lobby, but once he’d been defeated into coming out here, he needed
to remove them right away. But I put a restraining hand on his arm
and told him to have courage. After a few very tense minutes, the
wind picked up again and we watched many of the leaves rise and
swirl away again.

Bill tried to go remove the remaining leaves,
but I made him play “Twenty Questions” with me. He was always keen
to try winning a game with me because I invariably chose fairly
obscure television shows as my mystery answer and he had yet to get
one right. This time my answer was
Strange Luck
, a
short-lived (but I thought quite good) series that had been one of
many to try filling the primo time slot before
The X-Files
,
back when that ultimate paranoia-fest was still on Friday nights
and gaining a cult following. Bill was determined to someday figure
one of these stumpers out. Alas, it was not going to be that night.
But that was okay, because the real point was to distract him from
the leaves. This method of diverting Bill had helped us before, at
the office. Focusing on another, albeit unthreatening, problem
upset the ritual enough that he was no longer compelled to perform
it. Finally he said, “It’s getting better.”

“
Good. Do you think we can go inside?
It’s cold out here.”

He didn’t want to come inside, but my appeal
to his manners forced his hand; he couldn’t let his secretary
shiver on a nighttime street. I insisted on accompanying him up the
elevators to his eighth floor apartment. If I left him in the
lobby, he might start up again.

“
Now, Bill,” I said, stifling a yawn.
“You can’t do this to me anymore. It’s not good policy for me to
come to your rescue any time you get stuck.”

“
I’m sorry. She just wouldn’t stop
asking.”

“
It’s okay this time. And I wouldn’t
have reported you to Donna. Still, we can’t do it. It’s not even
for my own sake. I don’t think it does you any good,
either.”

“
I have this problem,” said Bill. “I
get these ideas in my mind. They won’t go away. Even as I tell
myself it’s ridiculous, I still can’t stop.”

We stepped off the elevator, and reluctantly
he moved toward a drab doorway in the midst of all the other drab
doorways on the drab hall. The place was not a dump, but I’d seen
more friendly atmospheres in prisons from TV shows I’d watched. He
opened his door, and I saw over his shoulder a tiny, nearly bare
apartment. It distressed me to see Bill live this way, even though
I knew why he had to. Having surroundings that were easy to control
was vital to his mental well-being. The apartment I saw beyond that
door had one purpose only—to allow Bill three rooms small enough
that he could effectively control every inch of the space. It’s not
dirt with Bill. It’s chaos he can’t stand. Open-ended things. Loose
threads. Everything he had was made of plastic, I saw, or encased
in it. It reminded me of a daycare center minus the color,
everything smooth and safe with no little pieces to swallow.

“
I think there are medications, Bill,”
I said at his doorway. “If you went to a doctor or a psychiatrist.
There’s a medication for everything out there, and I’ll bet they
have one that could help you avoid these kinds of
things.”

“
Oh, it’s not that serious.” He
couldn’t look me in the eye when he said that.

“
You have an obsessive-compulsive
disorder, Bill. You just spent a perfectly beautiful Saturday
monitoring the leaves in your gutter to prevent a car pileup that
most likely never would have happened anyway. Have you eaten today
or been to the bathroom in the last few hours or
anything?”

“
No, I guess I haven’t.”

I considered him, and he considered his shirt
cuffs, tugging and straightening them as he always did. “What
happened to set you off?” I asked.

“
Got a call this morning,” he replied,
“from an heir in an old estate I worked. Says he’s going to sue me
for malpractice.”

“
Over what?”

“
Coercing his father into signing a
will.”

“
If he called you, Bill, I doubt he’s
really going to go through with it. He would have gone to a lawyer
by now, and the lawyer would have told him not to contact
you.”

“
Maybe so. But this guy was awful. Mean
and bitter. Made me feel like I’d done something
corrupt.”

“
Never on this earth,” I insisted. “You
just had to talk to one of the assholes, that’s all. I’ll bet you
five bucks you never hear from him again.”

I was with Bill in a weak moment, when he’d
had little time to prepare his game face for me. He seemed both
younger and stranger than I’d ever known him to be at work. He
didn’t take me up on my bet, but said, “Carol, I couldn’t go to a
psychiatrist. I couldn’t possibly explain.”

“
I know it’s hard to explain, but their
job is to listen. And it’s not even stigmatized any more. It’s
positively fashionable to see a therapist.”

“
I’m almost always okay. It’s only once
in a while that it goes out of control.”

My skeptical look told him what I thought of
that remark.

“
I’ve been like this all my life,” he
said pleadingly.

“
Aw, it’s okay, Bill. Most of us are so
in love with our eccentricities that we couldn’t bear to part with
them.”

He appreciated my saying that, I think.

On Tuesday night, I was watching my chosen TV
show for the week: an intensely good one-season-only show called
Nowhere Man
starring Bruce Greenwood. It combined many
aspects I liked: it was a mystery, a thriller, a little bit of hard
science fiction and a lot of conspiracy theory. Possibly watching
something this heavy with conspiracy theory wasn’t a great idea for
me right then, sort of like when I watched too much
thirtysomething
right before a high school reunion and
showed up feeling fat, poor, and unable to make fascinating small
talk.

What’s with my preoccupation about
conspiracies? I had spent a good part of the day rushing through my
work so I could continue my research in Bill’s old files, and what
I had found was pushing all my paranoia buttons. I had uncovered
not only Bryony Gilbert and Bonita Voigt as past suicides, but also
another woman named Wanda Breakers. That was four, if I included
Adrienne Maxwell, but of course she might not have been a suicide,
so I wasn’t sure if I could include her in my list.

Regardless of whether I had three or four
suicides, I was a little freaked out about the whole thing.
Tomorrow morning, I planned to spend a bit more time in storage to
retrieve an additional three files that might or might not add to
my list. I was beginning to think that our law firm was a magnet
for suicidal women. My mind was busily spinning, trying to think of
a reason for this, and of course what I imagined could only be
described as vague and paranoid, or in other words, conspiracy
theory.