My Boss is a Serial Killer (2 page)

I’m sure we looked like a ridiculously
redundant duo when we returned to Detective Haglund. I was carrying
Bill’s black calendar and a fistful of business cards, and Charlene
was only holding a glass, but the detective was perhaps smart
and/or experienced enough to know that his presence caused a lot of
curiosity and speculation, especially around bored secretaries.
Charlene eyed him and then left us in her discreet and silent way,
closing the door behind her. I would have to give her a big hug for
that later.

“
So,” I said to Detective Haglund,
perusing the hard copy of Bill Nestor’s calendar as if it merited
careful study. “What time were you thinking of coming
by?”

“
The earlier the better,” he said.
“Your office is on my way to work.”

“
Eight?”

“
Sounds great.” He drank his soda and
smiled at me again. Before taking a chair, he’d removed his jacket
and confirmed what I’d suspected about his body already. He was a
big guy, with very good, broad shoulders and a thick solid build
with hard-as-wood muscles like a hockey player. There was a hint of
softening about him, a little weight gain that showed age was
sneaking around his tummy. He was in his mid-thirties, I guessed,
so that was typical but very sexy to me. I liked men who enjoyed
eating and weren’t so vain that they freaked out about carrying ten
extra pounds. And it feels nice, to rub against a tummy that has a
little give to it. I would have liked to have rubbed his tummy
right then.

The small conference room was quiet and
softly lit, a simple room with nothing more than a table, some
chairs, and a speakerphone, plus more bland modern art. If the
attorneys wanted to impress a client or scare an opposing counsel
this wasn’t the room where it was done. Since I felt cozy and
overly warm, I gave in to the atmosphere and became more
candid.

“
Of course, I didn’t have to drag you
in here to write an appointment down.” I closed Bill’s schedule
dismissively. “You said you wanted to meet about Adrienne Maxwell,
right? The suicide from last week.” Adrienne was an estate client
of Bill’s, and she had overdosed on pills the week before. I asked,
“Do the police usually investigate suicides?”

Detective Haglund broke eye contact with
me.

“
You’re probably not allowed to give me
details.” I glanced behind us at the conference room door as if to
ensure our solitude. “I imagine that there’s usually a good reason,
when a suicide is investigated. On television, it means that it
wasn’t a suicide at all, but a murder.”

“
Well.” Detective Haglund made a
production out of drinking his Coke some more, stalling for
time.

“
You probably get tired of people
telling you what they saw on television.” Stupid man, I thought. I
didn’t care about the case. I didn’t care if Adrienne Maxwell had
been eaten by sharks. I was trying to have a conversation. “I can’t
stand watching lawyer shows. They get all the details wrong.
Besides, after I spend all day with lawyers, I can’t stand the
thought of spending all night with them, too.”

“
But you like detective
shows?”

“
Oh sure. I like spending the night
with detectives.”

Allow me to pause here and say I was not
normally given to blatant double entendre. I was not by nature a
flirt or a tease. I’m sure I was acting up because of some
pervasive chemical imbalance in my brain brought on by the screw
deposition and the general malaise of Wednesdays. Members of an
office’s staff will do desperate things to break the cycle of
boredom. Flirting with the detective was a better option for me
than, say, crawling under my desk and stabbing my hand with a
letter opener.

My comment, awful though it was, caused
Detective Haglund to smile—not the killer grin, but a cutie-pie
smile this time—and he even laughed a little. He said, “I don’t
watch much television.”

“
I watch it almost
constantly.”

We looked at Bill’s closed schedule together,
eye contact once-removed. I felt it as clearly as if he’d put his
hand on mine.

To my new friend I said, “I’ll retrieve her
file from storage tonight so Bill can review it before your
meeting.”

My new friend said, “I may need a copy of
it.”

“
Bill is very vigilant about
confidentiality, just like you.”

“
I have some papers…” Detective Haglund
produced a stack of documents folded lengthwise. He went through
the stack to show me court orders, warrants, and releases but I
wasn’t really listening. This would all have to go through our risk
management people anyway; the contents of the documents weren’t
really my problem. Secretaries are fairly good at figuring out what
matters are not their responsibility and ignoring them. I was
taking note of things about the detective, for later when I would
be grilled by my coworkers. One—no wedding ring. Two—no cologne.
Three—no cigarette smoke. It was really very cute that he thought
he could show me all those important papers and I’d be able to do
anything about it.

“
These will have to go through Mr.
Miller,” I told him. “Is it all right if I keep them tonight and
return them to you tomorrow? I can arrange for all your paths to be
cleared before you talk to Bill.”

“
Would you do that?” Detective
Haglund’s friendliness attained a new gravity.

This was my chance to show him the real
extent of my powers. Secretarial power is a vague thing and seldom
seen or appreciated. We’re like the folks who work backstage at a
play: we’re doing our job best when you never realize that we’re
there.

I said, “I’ll take care of it, but after you
leave. Mr. Miller is our quality assurance maniac and the go-to guy
for confidentiality matters. If I take these things to him while
you’re here, he’ll want to meet you. That’s code for interrogation.
Before you realize it, you’ll be up to your chin in a departmental
meeting and you’ll probably be billed for the time.”

Detective Haglund’s face grew solemn at my
joke, and I sensed a past run-in with an attorney.

“
But,” I said quickly, “if you slip
quietly out the front door, I can claim complete ditzy ignorance,
make a few copies, stick a label on them, and viola! By tomorrow,
you’ll be able to talk to Bill about his client.”

“
You make it sound like
magic.”

“
That’s what it is. Secretary magic.” I
made an honest attempt not to beam at him, yet I couldn’t really
help myself. My God, what a cutie.

“
Well I’m glad I got to meet you first,
Carol.” Detective Haglund got to his feet, picking up the few
things that he wasn’t going to leave with me. He shrugged into his
jacket. “Sounds like I started with the right person.”

“
I’m always the right person to start
with.”

He held my worshipful gaze with his own. His
was not worshipful, I suppose, but it was a healthy shade of
appreciative. I exercised self-restraint and did not leap on
him.

“
Do you have a business card or
anything I can give Mr. Nestor?” I asked.

Gus produced a stack of cards from that same
bottomless pit of a pocket where he kept everything he owned. I
took three of them. “For the QA people,” I lied. I gave him a card
of my own, because I’d been careful to grab a few when I passed my
desk on the way back from getting his soda, my intentions fully
formed.

“
This is my direct line,” I explained,
indicating the obvious, as an excuse to get right up next to him
and bow my head next to his, “and this is my cell phone. Feel free
to call me on the cell, if you need to.”

I smiled up at him without much pretense.

“
It’s best to call me instead of Mr.
Nestor, anyway,” I continued, “because I always know how to get in
touch with him, and I don’t mind. The clients call me frequently. I
don’t have a husband or a roommate or anything, so it doesn’t
bother anybody.”

Detective Gus Haglund peered at me.

“
I’m saying that I’m single,” I assured
him.

Oh friends and neighbors, that was so unlike
me. I swear it was that screw deposition that made me into a tramp.
But no, you say. You say, Carol, you can’t blame everything you did
that afternoon on being bored at work. People are bored at work
every day without resorting to harlotry. So I’ll make this
admission. I’d been divorced for three years and had been on very
few dates. I hadn’t been asked much, hadn’t wanted to go out much
anyway, and hadn’t sent out any signals. An entire life upheaval
had happened to me back then, and as a result I’d retreated into a
protective, quiet little shell that was, if not utterly rewarding,
comfortable and easy for me. Emerging on the other side from this
extended mental vacation, I found myself feeling more confident
than ever and also a little reckless. I was doing harmless
eccentric things in every corner of my life—painting my furniture,
buying racy shoes, acting rather indifferent to authority. This
episode was a bit more extreme than any of the others had been so
far, but then again, Detective Augustus Haglund was my
inspiration.

How is it that a human can feel mortified and
pleased at the same time? I couldn’t believe I’d just announced my
availability, but I was proud of myself for having done so. Anyway,
what was the worst that could happen? I figured that at the very
worst, Detective Haglund would leave the building puzzled and
disgusted by the trampy secretary who had assaulted him after just
ten minutes of acquaintanceship, and tomorrow when he came to meet
with Bill, he would politely ignore me.

What happened instead was that he said,
“Maybe you should give me another one of those cards. One has to go
in the file, but I’d like to keep one for myself. In case I need to
verify any information with you.”

Beaming, I handed him another business card.
I hoped my hand didn’t shake when he took it from me.

He said, “Thank you for your time and all
your help.”

Oh, no! He had to leave? Probably had some
murders to solve, suspects to grill. That sounded a lot more
exciting than what I had to do. He had to follow some leads given
to him by his streetwise informants, who were doubtlessly all
hookers. He was probably friends with lots of hookers. They were
probably all hookers with hearts of gold, who looked upon him as
their savior. I wished I were a hooker with a heart of gold.

“
So I’ll see you tomorrow morning,
bright and early,” I said, guiding him back toward the office
lobby.

He agreed that he would. So much in common! I
kept doing silly things for him, like pushing the elevator button
and waiting while the rackety old deathtrap lurched up to our
floor. Lucille watched us, hawklike, from the reception desk.

“
I forgot to ask you,” said Detective
Gus Haglund suddenly. “Did you know Adrienne Maxwell?”

“
Not very well, but I talked to her a
few times. It was a couple of years ago.”

“
I may have some questions for you
tomorrow.” The elevator came, yawning open before us. He held it
open with one hand, his attention on me. “Nothing intense, so don’t
worry.”

“
I wasn’t worried.”

“
I’ll see what I can get from Mr.
Nestor first; it may not even be relevant.”

“
You’re such a tease,” I accused
him.

“
Bye,” said Detective Gus
Haglund.

“
Bye.” I watched the elevator close and
leave. Screw, screw, screw. The words sang softly in my
head.

“
Scale of one to ten?” asked Lucille
rather loudly.

Turning from the doors that had just devoured
my new friend, I told her, “His name is Augustus.”

Charlene materialized at Lucille’s side.
“Well? What did he ask you?”

“
Nine and a half,” I said to
Lucille.

The receptionist looked disappointed in me.
“Why not ten?”

“
Because all the data has not been
compiled. Now, I need to get back to work.”

Having declared my need to get back to work,
I was cleared to come and tell them everything that had just
happened. Women want details, and women provide details. If there
is a detail a woman can’t remember, she is perfectly qualified to
make something up that is just as good.

So impressive was Detective Haglund that we
barely discussed why he had come in the first place. The important
thing was that he had arrived looking good, that he hadn’t shot
down my advances out of hand, and that he was coming back the next
day. His cuteness went a long way to crushing speculation about why
he was interested in Adrienne Maxwell’s suicide or what Bill Nestor
might be able to tell him about it.

A legal secretary is not necessarily a
secretary who abides by the law, but a secretary who works
specifically for an attorney, paralegal, or judge. The
qualifications are specialized: one must be capable of performing
ordinary secretarial tasks while tolerating whatever brand of
mental illness the attorney, paralegal, or judge is suffering.
Secretaries who work in the non-legal field may argue with me that
mental illness is not exclusive to the legal field. However, like
eating disorders and ballet dancing, mental illness and law are a
matched pair.

As a legal secretary, I learned to wrangle
paper. The practice of law can generate mountains, tides, great
rivers of paper like molten lava, so heavy that the fissures could
crack open the Earth’s crust if brave souls like myself were not
there to file it all away. There are lots of ways to waste paper,
and I am proficient at all of them except origami. I can make far
too many copies of one document, create a special file called
“extra copies” and then stuff them in there; I can just make one
copy of something really long and then never look at it again; or I
can distribute copies of things to long lists of people who will
never read them and then generate a memo telling those same people
that I sent them a copy of the thing they don’t care to read.
Litigation loves paper. Despite everything that modern courts are
doing to convert to electronic data, the legal system finds ways to
use email, the internet and electronic filing systems to create yet
more paper.