My Boss is a Serial Killer (3 page)

A client of the firm always had a file full
of paper regarding his or her case, and I lavished love and
attention on that file, stuffing it with all the extra paper,
labels, sticky notes, and tabs that I could find. When the case was
finished and the client no longer actively being billed, I kissed
my gorgeously maintained baby good-bye and sent it to storage where
it slept in long rows of boxes full of similar files. Months or
years might pass before I needed it again, but always they could be
summoned back to me, as a medium might summon a wandering
spirit.

Except that I didn’t have a medium; I had
Lloyd.

Lloyd must have been dropped on his head as a
baby. That was the only reason I could think that he was so
automatically and uselessly disagreeable. He somehow had become the
manager of MBS&K’s file room despite being the most reticent
worker I had ever known. I speculated about his making deals with
Satan, though I doubted Satan would have had the patience.

The afternoon before, when I asked him to
retrieve the Adrienne Maxwell file from storage, he’d done an
admirable job of eye-rolling and sighing. Please understand,
“storage” is not in Anchorage, Alaska. It is in the basement of our
building. All that evil little troll had to do was take the service
elevator downstairs, pick up one file, and then ride the elevator
up again. I had the gall to ask if I could get it back the same
afternoon.

He responded, “I have sixteen new files to
open. I have a copy job rush for Bronk. I’ve got to get five cases
of coffee to the break room. I’m expected to get these FedEx’s
delivered to the lobby by four.”

Lloyd perpetually had a list of things to do
that he would gladly rattle off to anyone who asked him to do
something else, giving the impression that he was the lone worker
in that vast and manically busy file room. He had three clerks
under him, somewhere. But maybe they were hiding.

I asked, “How about tomorrow morning then? At
seven?”

The hour of seven offended Lloyd, though I
happened to know that he was always at work by six. Come to think
of it, I didn’t recall a time when he wasn’t at work. He must have
had a cave back in the file room where he slept curled in a little
ball, surrounded by the skulls of his victims.

“
Bill will need time to review it
before an eight o’clock meeting,” I insisted.

“
Well, why’d ya wait until the very
last minute to ask for it?”

Honestly, I didn’t have to explain myself to
this evil little troll, but here I was, doing it anyway. “The
meeting was only set up a little while ago.” And then, because he
kept staring me down, I found myself explaining even further. “A
detective from the police department is meeting with Bill about
this case file. First thing in the morning.”

“
What’s a detective got to do with
anything?”

“
This client died last
week.”

“
Why’s he want to see her
file?”

I was beside myself with frustration. “I’m
sure I don’t know. Maybe you should talk to him tomorrow morning
and find out.”

Lloyd fixed me with a watery, baleful
stare.

“
Can I please put in a request for the
Maxwell file now?”

He grumbled, which is as close to a yes as
you’ll ever hear from Lloyd.

And so, on the Thursday morning that
Detective Augustus Haglund was going to meet with Bill Nestor, I
got to work at seven. The question of
what-is-my-sexiest-but-still-work-appropriate-sweater had been
answered with my eggshell white twin set, which I had been told
looked good on me. I had actually put hot curlers in my dark hair,
and I had used a slightly darker eye shadow than usual. But I put a
limit on the vamping up, because Gussie was a detective and might
notice that I’d gone out of my way to look pretty. So, no halter
top, no leather mini-skirt, and I kept my heels at two inches
rather than four.

For a moment I hoped my sexier appearance
might have a positive effect on Lloyd and he’d just give me my file
without grumbling or swearing. “Good morning?” I called into the
rows of files. “Lloyd, are you in here?”

Lloyd shuffled out, rheumy-eyed and
scowling.

“
Good morning!” I insisted. Just try, I
thought, just you try to piss me off. I was in a happy place and I
was lookin’ fine.

“
What is it?” asked Lloyd. He glowered
up at me. Lloyd was 170 years old, and his entire face was made of
a frown. His eyes always leaked behind his thick, warping glasses.
His body, and frankly I don’t even like thinking about it, was both
scrawny and pot-bellied. I try never to mock people just because
they aren’t especially attractive, but Lloyd was a
bastard.

“
I’m here to pick up my file. Adrienne
Maxwell.”

Let the performance begin. Lloyd executed his
critically acclaimed rendition of a man who (a) doesn’t know what
you’re talking about, (b) doesn’t know why you’d bother him with
your burdensome presence, and (c) isn’t going to make any attempt
to discover the answers to (a) or (b). But I waited him out this
morning. I was in my eggshell twin set. I was a saucy brunette with
smoky eyelids and wavy locks of hair. I had the nerve to smile at
him sweetly. We stood that way for fifteen seconds.

He shuffled to a cart laden with files. Mine
was on top, and we went through the procedure of Lloyd transferring
it laboriously into my arms. Had I tried to pick it up myself, I
might have lost a hand.

“
Thanks, Lloyd!”

Lloyd probably kept his job because the
attorneys were terrified of him. Fear was not my response, exactly.
Gruesome fascination was closer to the truth. Over-the-top kindness
is the best way to avenge oneself on Lloyd. He can’t stand to
believe he hasn’t ruined your day. I planned to buy him a
vending-machine candy bar later to thank him for his help. It would
drive him nuts.

I took a few minutes to review Adrienne’s
file before taking it to my boss. Bill had a thriving legal
practice setting up estate documents for people, and as his
secretary I attended at least one and often several meetings a week
with clients to go over their estate plans. A client from over two
years before, namely Adrienne, didn’t stand out in my mind in any
good relief. I might have recognized her had she walked through the
door, and I’d heard her voice on the telephone a few times, but the
meetings themselves? No, they weren’t anything to which I could
attest, to use the legal term for it. After enough of these, it all
starts to meld together. The same questions, the same forms, the
same procedure for getting it all signed. The will, the power of
attorney, the advanced healthcare directives, and sometimes a
trust.

Lucky for us, Bill took meticulous notes
about the people he met. So I could see that Adrienne had been
planning to take a cruise with her cousin, and that she taught a
community class on low-sodium cooking. This helped flesh her out.
With a pang I realized that she was dead.

We had met with plenty of widows like
Adrienne. Women tended to outlive their husbands, so it was a
common facet of the business. Bill was very good with older women
because he was so polite and unthreatening. With any one of them,
Bill ran through all the minutia of her property and funds and
where she would like it all to go, but to divert the poor thing
from dwelling on her own death, he would always ask about travel
plans, family, friends and who would be looking out for her. He
made himself seem like the ultimate guardian angel, affirming that
she locked her doors at night and didn’t talk to strangers. The
client usually responded well to this; a woman who has lost her
husband doesn’t mind a capable man expressing concern about her
well-being. And Bill never did it in a way that seemed lecherous.
He wasn’t after their money or out to take advantage of them, and
they could sense it in his dark and compassionate gaze.

But he was like that with them all, though in
a less intense way with his male customers or with the married
couples, but knowing that he had done these things for Adrienne
Maxwell still didn’t call up specific memories of her. I looked
through her forms, which were the standard set-up with nothing out
of the ordinary to help me recall her.

I think Bill learned of her suicide the week
before, on the Monday after it happened, when her daughter called
to tell him. He mentioned it to me in our morning “powwow,” as he
liked to call it.

“
You remember Adrienne
Maxwell?”

I admitted to knowing the name but not
recalling her specifically.

“
She died over the weekend,” he
said.

“
Oh, that’s too bad. She wasn’t very
old, was she?” I puzzled through my faint memories.

“
Why no, she wasn’t even sixty yet.
Listen, Carol,” and here Bill rose from his desk and came closer to
speak to me more confidentially. “According to her daughter
Clarissa, it looks like Adrienne committed suicide.”

“
You’re kidding.”

“
I know it’s hard to believe. Sometimes
those who have lost a spouse find it hard to be alone. It’s really
a shame.”

Sounded like a cliché to me but I had to keep
in mind that I was so happy to get rid of my stupid ex-husband that
I’d invented a little song and dance about it: He’s gone, he’s
gone, do the happy dance, gone to be an ass to someone else, la la
la la. Or something like that. I hadn’t really been trying for art.
But I had to grant that some people might miss their spouses.

I expressed the same thought to Bill. “I
guess I don’t know what that’s like, to lose a spouse and have it
be painful.”

“
Oh, Carol, you’re too funny.” He
pretended to be scowling at me for a moment, waving his finger. “Do
me a favor, though. Don’t mention this around the office. Ms.
Maxwell’s family has a certain amount of pull around town. They’re
rather particular about this rumor spreading.”

“
Okay, mum’s the word.” I locked my
lips closed. I never gossiped about our clients. It wasn’t good
business, and most of the time they weren’t interesting enough
anyway.

He backpedaled suddenly, as if concerned that
he might have offended me. Bill was always thoughtful about my
feelings. “Oh, I know you’re very discreet. And it’s not a state
secret. But I know how Lucille can be.”

I smothered a laugh.

Bill did an impression of a Southern belle,
saying, “Ah do declare, how shockin’ that our client has
voluntarily shaken her mortal coil!”

He did a pretty good Lucille, who was,
indeed, the goddess of gossip and who tried to hide her blatant
nosiness under a patina of innocent Southern charm. Still, he was
right. I understood what he meant, and I didn’t say anything. Thus
no one at the firm took much notice that we’d had a client
die—hell, Bill was an estate attorney. Death was part of his
business. His clients died often enough. If Gus Haglund hadn’t
shown up asking questions, I guess no one would have said much of
anything.

Bill’s office was a testament to his personal
beliefs—a flat, clean, gray tribute to minimalism. Nothing
decorated the walls except his diplomas and bar certificates,
framed in black and hung with laser precision, one in the center of
each of the four walls. Naturally one could look in his desk
drawers and find four pencils, sharp, in a line perpendicular to
four legal tablets; four red markers with their pocket clips all
pointing left; four blue felt-tips beside them but not touching. Of
course his books were in rows according to size and color. He kept
no plants except one brutally pruned bonsai tree in a bed of
virginal white pebbles. He kept his surfaces bare, and when
something had to be placed on a surface (his computer, his phone)
it was placed with precision up against a corner or flush with an
edge. No asymmetry permitted. It was best not to mess with Bill’s
stuff.

I could give him files to work on but he
didn’t like to keep them overnight in there, for fear that the
voluminous paper inside might leak staples and contaminate his
stuff. One time he became distraught by a loose staple he found in
his carpet, and that weekend he went over the floor himself with a
strong magnet to make sure no others were lurking there. It was all
right for my desk to be askew and riddled with staples on the
loose; I guess he’d been forced to concede control outside his own
office door years before. Files were permitted to stay on his desk
as long as he was around and could keep an eye on them, but at the
end of the day they had to return to my cubicle.

I went to Bill that morning as he perused his
email messages at his desk. My job would be to sort them into their
own archive files and respond to them. Bill couldn’t type, and he
wasn’t comfortable with what he perceived as the complexities of
email.

Bill was the most average-looking individual
I’d ever known, not in that he was okay-looking, but in that he was
nondescript with a face that could vanish from memory within
seconds. Much of his vanishing act was caused by how he carried
himself, skirting the walls, slumping his shoulders, all but fading
into his surroundings. Like me, Bill seemed to have an any-face,
open to interpretation if one had the imagination for it. I guess
he could have been considered modestly handsome, or totally dorky,
or possibly gay, or without any noticeable sex appeal based on the
age, sex, and temperament of the person doing the analysis. And I
say that with all affection. Once people got to know Bill well,
they tended to forget what he looked like physically and focus on
his “quirky” personality. But more on that later.

Every day he wore a white dress shirt, a gray
suit, a gray tie, and black shoes. His gray hair had thinned on top
of his head, but he hadn’t lost it all and wasn’t going to. At
forty-six, if he was going to go bald, it would have happened by
now. His eyes were soulfully dark and intense, but typically he did
not make eye contact with anyone except for clients or me, so not
many people realized that.