My Boss is a Serial Killer (16 page)

“
Why did you write this, here?” he
asked curiously after a minute, indicating the column where I’d
included the approximate date that their estate work had been
done.

“
I was wondering if there was some
pattern, if their suicide was a predictable amount of time after
they’d finished their estate documents.”

“
You think that’s related somehow?” He
looked at me with earnest attention.

“
Maybe,” I said. “I’ve heard that
sometimes, when someone plans to commit suicide, she’ll start
putting her affairs in order. What’s a better way to do that than
make out a will?”

Bill reexamined the list. “The times between
are rather varied, and some of them are more than two years.”

“
It was just a theory. Am I being
crazy?”

“
That’s not what I meant. This is
certainly a very interesting pattern.” He put the paper down in
front of him, its bottom edge parallel to the edge of his desk. He
took a moment to straighten it until the line looked good to
him.

“
They’re all despondent,” I
added.

“
Hmm?”

“
All of the widows are despondent; it
says so in your notes. Every one of them.”

“
Oh, really? Maybe I need to get a
thesaurus. I guess that’s the word I use for when someone seems
particularly depressed.”

“
I guess it makes sense, if they’re all
recently widowed.”

“
Of course I remember all of these
women, but it hadn’t occurred to me how many of them were suicides.
Then again…”

“
It is odd. But is it…relevant? I mean,
insurance companies are the ones that keep track of mortality rates
and all that. They’ve probably noticed a pattern like this a long
time ago. It kind of makes sense. An older widow might be more
likely to kill herself. Could be why it’s hard to get life
insurance policies then, I don’t know.”

“
Yes, that could be true.”

“
Of course, except for Adrienne Maxwell
and one of the others, I think it was Wanda Breakers, these women
didn’t have life insurance policies. They didn’t need them. It said
so in your notes.”

Bill’s eyes flicked up to mine.

I didn’t catch anything in his eyes but
cautious interest. So I went on, “But it’s really sad, too. They’re
not old women. None of them are much more than sixty-five. That’s
just retirement age. And they all had enough money to enjoy
retirement if they wanted to.”

“
Maybe they didn’t see how to enjoy
life with their husbands gone.”

“
In some cases, enjoying life without a
husband is no stretch of the imagination.” I said, rather more
pointedly than I meant to. “I started finding life very enjoyable
once mine was out of the picture.”

Bill granted me a laugh; he was usually
amused by my ex-husband bashing. “It’s why I never got married,”
he’d said once, after hearing one of my many backhanded comments,
“so no woman could ever dislike me so much.”

“
Actually, I was trying to see it from
their point of view,” was what he said now. “Maybe they felt there
was nothing left of value in their lives.”

“
Their children?
Grandchildren?”

“
Oh, children. There’s
that.”

“
Hobbies? Travel? Charity work?
Mentoring?” I gazed at the list. “It’s hard for me to understand
why anyone in fairly good health with a fair amount of money would
just chuck it.”

“
Well, Carol…” We’d entered into
territory that Bill wasn’t expecting. He thought I’d come to
discuss a statistical anomaly. “What are you thinking?”

“
Nothing. I just wondered if you think
this is typical behavior for widows. I’ve never heard of it before,
but I’m just a secretary.”

Bill sat back and thought for a while,
perusing his memory. He mused, “A great number of my clients die.
It’s just the nature of my work. Some of them are bound to be
suicides.”

“
That’s true.”

“
You say you only found these
six?”

“
That’s all I found. I guess there
could be more. My search methods weren’t completely scientific.
Plus, the firm only keeps records for ten years. After that, Lloyd
says they go to microfiche at some off-site storage facility.
Although that’s not a precise system, either. I found papers in
that storage room that date back to the Kennedy administration. But
I haven’t checked anything earlier than 1995. I was also limited by
how much stuff had been saved on our firm’s database. Those records
aren’t perfect.”

Bill looked unconvinced that my list meant
anything. “I almost always speak to the family, once I hear of a
death, and sometimes they said suicide, but it never seemed more
prevalent than when they’d say cancer or heart disease. Still, a
list like this makes it look pervasive, doesn’t it?”

I shrugged.

“
I’ll do a little checking,” said
Bill.

I was surprised.

“
Well, it is rather interesting. And if
it turns out that Kansas City has an unreasonably high suicide rate
among widows, we can publish a paper and the phenomenon will be
named after us. The Frank-Nestor Syndrome.”

“
Yeah, what a great namesake,” I
said.

“
Have you mentioned this to your
detective?”

For a moment I was so pleased at having Gus
called “my” detective that I couldn’t think to answer. “Hmm? No.
No, I felt silly bringing it up to him. This is probably something
that the police already know about, and I don’t want to sound like
a dork.’”

“
The police should have caught on by
now, especially if there’s some unusual suicide pact among retired
widows.” He continued, warming to the topic. “However, this could
be a very interesting little statistical glitch.”

“
What could be causing it?”

“
No idea. But if you’re willing, we can
make a little project finding out about it.”

This could go a couple of different
directions. Sometimes when a boss mentions a “little project” he
means that you’re about to get a buttload of work pushed off on you
because no one else wants to do it. But Bill had never done that to
me before. He was actually remarkably willing to do his own grunge
work.

“
How’d you like to spend a couple days
outside the office?” he asked me. “I was thinking, if you wouldn’t
mind, you could head over to KU’s medical library, maybe UMKC, and
do some research for us.”

“
Research on what?”

“
Actually I’d like to hear your ideas
on the subject. National suicide rates? Common methodology?
Insurance company studies on who kills themselves and how? This
would be a sort of fishing expedition.”

“
There are probably actuary tables
available for review,” I said. “I could even find out if anyone
else has picked up on this pattern.”

“
Good idea.” Bill seemed excited by
this. “Are you willing?”

“
It sounds like it might be fun,” I
said. Former English majors may be one of the few breeds who think
that spending a day doing research might be “fun”, but I continued,
uncertainly, “What about the regular work, though?”

“
There’s nothing going on here that I
can’t handle. I’ll probably spend most of the day on the phone
anyway, and I have a couple meetings. Was there something else you
were assigned to do?”

“
I have this big screw deposition
summary for Suzanne.”

“
Don’t worry about that. I don’t know
why she pushes that nonsense off on you anyway. I’ll tell Suzanne
that you’re out working on a special project for me, and that’s all
she needs to know about it.”

“
Well, okay then. I’ll see what
information I can dig up.”

To my surprise, Bill handed two twenty-dollar
bills across his desk to me. “For copies,” he said, “And to buy
yourself some lunch.”

“
You don’t have to do that. The firm
has an account—”

“
No, don’t charge the firm,” he
interrupted. “This is not a firm project. This is our project.
Which leads me to my next request. Which I feel a little
uncomfortable asking you.”

Bill had never managed to alarm me before,
and he didn’t manage it now. I knew him well enough not to expect
anything shady or filthy to come out of his mouth. “Let’s keep this
between us, all right?” he asked, turning a bit pink in the cheeks.
“And here’s why I’d like that. If it turns out that we’re actually
onto something concrete that hasn’t been picked up on by anyone
else, I think we might be able to publish our findings.”

“
Publish them where?”

“
I think that would depend on what we
discover. However, you realize that we work with a lot of people
who like to take credit for work they didn’t do or to jam up the
works with red tape and bureaucracy. The easiest way to get
anything done around here is to just do it first and then ask
permission later.”

“
Never a truer word was spoken,” I
agreed dryly, remembering a number of occasions when a painfully
easy request had been turned into a committee meeting. Most of the
clerical staff knew this truth, but I hadn’t realized any attorneys
knew it, too. I thought they loved bureaucracy.

“
If this turns out to be significant,”
Bill said, “I want the two of us to get the credit for it. Carol
Frank and Bill Nestor, and your name comes first not because of the
alphabet but because you’re the one who figured it out.”

“
Cut it out,” I said, but I was
flattered. Getting credit for being clever isn’t something that
happens a lot in my line of work. “So when do you want me to
go?”

“
Right away. Whenever you’re ready.” He
waved me off, cheerfully. “Take today, take tomorrow. If you could
report to me tomorrow afternoon with any findings, that would give
me the weekend to review them. Why don’t we plan on meeting
tomorrow at two?”

“
Sure, Bill.” I was thinking of all the
ways that this could work for my benefit. If I did a really quick,
efficient job today, I could have most of Friday off.

That’s probably what Bill had in mind, too.
If I hadn’t busy thinking of ways to blow off work, I might have
thought about how strange it was that he was willing to go almost
two entire days without a secretary. This was a man who freaked out
if anything changed, who always wanted to know where I was, and who
couldn’t wipe his nose without a confirmation letter.

No, I was definitely thinking about an early
evening. Sleeping in on a Friday. Having lunch in a restaurant
while I reviewed my notes, looking like someone important.

I was tempted to flaunt my special assignment
a little, because heck, they don’t even let the paralegals out into
the sunlight more than a couple times a month. But I had promised
to be discreet. The only people who got to know were my supervisor
Donna, who was really too busy to ask questions, and Suzanne, who
automatically saw this as a major invasion of her domain.

Suzanne considered herself to be some kind of
Uber-Paralegal, with dominion over all creation. She was the
paralegal that Bill used most often because, as I mentioned, he
trusted her about as much as he could trust someone (with me being
the exception, ha
ha
). She was also allowed to bring work to
me when she became so bogged down in her own super-powered
adventures that she could not be bothered to do something so banal
as type. That’s how I got stuck with that stupid screw deposition
in the first place.

When I first was hired at MBS&K, Suzanne
and I got along well, because she assumed I wouldn’t last long
working for Bill or I’d become one of those quivering messes that a
really neurotic attorney can make of a secretary. She did not
understand that I’d just come from the worst boss in the world, and
that I was so glad to be with Bill, who was at least nice to me,
that I didn’t mind anything. As Bill and I became increasingly
compatible, Suzanne became decreasingly nice to me until we lived
in a state of virtual tolerance that barely concealed our
irritation.

I tried to take into account that Suzanne
lived with a lot of pain. She had a strange personal history, and
at age 39 she had already lost two husbands. And I don’t mean
divorce, I mean they had both died. The first had died of spinal
meningitis, and a few years later she married a man who soon
afterward was killed in a car accident. So I tried to be patient
with her, figuring that if she acted a little stressed out, it was
nothing personal toward me. But after a while, I came to feel that
everybody has pain in life, and it’s not a free ticket to be a
bitch. Then I stopped feeling so sorry for her. In my darker
moments I wondered if she had driven her husbands to seek permanent
ways to escape her, but that’s mean-spirited. I would never have
said something like that to her face.

She was a fairly attractive woman—well, she
might have been gorgeous, except for the constant scowl on her
face. As my mother liked to say, “You’d be a very pretty girl, if
only you’d smile.” Suzanne was very tall, with a boyish figure that
looked terrific in clothes, a big fun-looking puff of naturally
curly brown hair, and a truly awful pair of tortoiseshell bifocals
that went out of style twenty years ago. To accompany her strange
history with husbands, she also had a strange history of names. She
was then Suzanne Farkanansia, the name she picked up from her most
recent dead spouse, which no one could pronounce, much less spell.
It was something like Far-Kan-Ann-Sha, but even Suzanne didn’t say
it the same way two days in a row. Before that, she was the very
unfortunately named Suzanne Cunk, and I think her maiden name was
Wedetzsmiller. In total then, her name was Suzanne Wedetzsmiller
Cunk Farkanansia, a series of words that will get your movie an
R-rating if you say them too fast.