My Boss is a Serial Killer (6 page)

Getting out of the office was nice, and Bill
and I always had pleasant conversations on the way. I also liked
riding in his fancy-schmancy BMW, which he kept as neat as he kept
everything else. No breakfast crumbs or wadded tissues in this
baby. It was like riding in a brand new car every time.

Thursday afternoon we went to a retirement
home where a family was signing powers of attorney for an aging
father, who freely admitted that he was getting to the point where
he could not reliably make decisions for himself, and also he
wanted to sign a DNR (a do-not-resuscitate order, that is). This
might sound like a somber occasion, but experience had taught me
that making these sorts of arrangements can be very pleasant, even
happy, if it’s spun the right way. As Bill would have said, “We’re
not talking about how you are going to die. We’re talking about how
you are going to live.”

We once tried to draw up these documents for
an elderly woman who seemed convinced that a DNR was her family’s
permission to murder her, as if as soon as she signed it they’d be
free to smother her with a pillow. Poor old thing. Well, of course,
we couldn’t force her to sign and there was no convincing her that
it wasn’t all a great evil scheme. I remember expressing my
sympathy for her family to Bill, and he’d surprised me by replying,
“Maybe her family doesn’t deserve to be trusted.”

That day was different, though, as I said.
Bill asked me about Detective Haglund on the drive through the city
suburbs, wanting to confirm for himself that I’d managed to get at
least the promise of a phone call. He was delighted when I told him
that I had a Saturday lunch date.

“
It’s not like you to play matchmaker,”
I accused playfully. “Not that I don’t appreciate it.”

“
Detective Haglund seems like a good
sort. And you never go out,” said Bill.

“
Just means I have more time to spend
at work.”

“
At your age, you shouldn’t spend all
your time at work.”

“
What, pray tell, should I be doing,
then? I’m not a party girl, Bill. I don’t like bars, and most of
the men I meet are so god-awful materialistic.”

“
Are they really?”

“
No kidding,” I said. “They’re obsessed
with money, with gadgets, owning things, having all the latest
stuff including the right sort of girlfriend. Drives me
nuts.”

“
Was your ex like that?”

“
He would have been, if he could have
afforded it. But he had an issue with working, in that he didn’t
want to. He was in a band and called himself an artist and, in his
opinion, artists don’t have to work because it clogs up their
creative juices or something.”

“
I can’t picture you with a man like
that.”

Think it was odd that Bill and I were
chatting like girlfriends as he drove us to the retirement home? I
did, too, the first time it happened, but I realized after a while
that Bill was rather like me. He was a life-voyeur who liked to
hear about what other people did and why they did it, but wasn’t
eager to participate in the actual events.

In response to his comment I said, “Well, you
know a different me than I was when I married him. I wasn’t stupid,
but I was more impetuous. It was one of those things where a girl
goes for the plunge even though she’s fairly sure it will end
badly. I was crazy in love, and it did seem, for a little while
there, that he might make a success out of being a musician.”

“
Really? Why didn’t he make
it?”

“
Bad luck, maybe, and he wasn’t willing
to take criticism constructively, and he tended to give up if
things didn’t work out perfectly. Plus, after a couple years he
wasn’t interested in being married to me so much as he wanted to be
married to my salary.”

“
That’s too bad. And you’re such a
catch, too. What an idiot he must have been.”

I laughed at his odd praise. “God, Bill,
you’re making me blush.”

“
I hope you have much better luck with
your detective.”

“
Well it’s only a lunch date,” I said,
“but if it turns into an engagement, I promise you’ll be the first
to know.”

Bill relented, looking abashed but pleased
with himself. “When you get him alone and at your mercy, try and
find out what the big mystery is with Adrienne’s suicide.”

“
Really? Is that ethical?”

“
Maybe not, but wouldn’t you like to
know? Anyway they leak those details to reporters all the time,
don’t they?”

“
I only know what I see on
TV.”

“
Still, I’d like to know what it was
about the drugs that makes them suspicious. And if the witness has
given a good description of the mysterious departing
figure.”

I understood Bill’s interest—I felt the
same—but I wasn’t planning to undermine the first date with my
fantasy boyfriend by making him believe I only wanted case
information. “I’ll ask, but only if he brings up the subject,” I
said.

“
Sure, of course. Only if he brings it
up.”

At the retirement home we climbed out and
walked side by side through the sliding glass doors. This was a
nice place, unusually clean, cheerful, and boasting enough staff.
It probably cost a fortune to room anyone there. We had been to
both types, the nice places and the not-so-nice ones, but
regardless of the circumstances Bill always treated the clients
with the same care. And not just the clients, but everyone.
Sometimes in the halls of these buildings, he would catch the eye
of some lonely old soul and stop to talk, and he would do the same
with nurses and orderlies, too. It wasn’t entirely about being
neighborly; he’d gotten a lot of referral business this way.

Between greetings in the hall Bill said
suddenly, “I’m sorry that your ex-husband treated you so
carelessly.”

I was only a little surprised by this
admission. And a little embarrassed, too, I guess. It’s never great
fun for people to know how gullible I was—or for how long. I was
flip about it. “Not as sorry as I am for putting up with him. I
thought that if I worked hard enough, I could fix him and fix my
relationship with my ex-boss, too, which was abusive in a whole
different way. Turns out I couldn’t fix either one. So you can see
I’m a little fed up with men.”

“
Detective Haglund is a much better
prospect.”

“
Well, I won’t argue with
that.”

We had reached the client’s room, so we
ceased our conversation about the perils of love and got to work.
We sounded like a chummy little team, didn’t we? And most of the
time we were. But if things were really that simple with Bill, he
wouldn’t have gone through close to thirty secretaries before he
finally found me.

Way back when I was barely twenty-seven years
old, I found myself divorced and unemployed.

Both of these conditions were of my own
choosing. The stupid ex-husband brought up divorce, because he had
fallen in love with an Icelandic model. She had come to the United
States to star in a music video, and now he was going to follow her
back to Reykjavik—or wherever the hell she was from—and being
married to me interfered with that plan. But I whole-heartedly
agreed that marriage wasn’t doing much for my social life, either.
I was more active in producing the condition of unemployment,
deciding that I’d better quit my job before I spent the rest of my
life in prison for murdering the psychotic sadist who dared call
himself my boss.

Circumstances landed me on the doorstep of
MBS&K, which the headhunter told me was hiring for several
staff positions. I did a quick introductory interview with the
office supervisor, Donna. Then I was put in the office of Terry
Bronk, the “Bronk” of Markitt, Bronk, Simms & Kowalsky, where I
interviewed to be his secretary.

I knew within five minutes that I wouldn’t
work for this guy. He reminded me so much of the psychotic sadist
that I got chills down my arms. He had a plaque behind his desk
that said PERSEVERANCE, and he pointed to it a lot, saying things
like, “In my firm, we don’t give up until we get it done right. I
surround myself with people who are willing to go the extra mile. I
believe that the answer you want is always out there if you work
hard enough to find it.”

Of course, he didn’t say all those things in
a row like that. He peppered his entire monologue with them. And
what a monologue it was! I haven’t been to many job interviews in
my life, but at most of them, the interviewer questions the
interviewee. This guy, this onion-faced, pepper-headed, middle-aged
egomaniac, did not ask me a single question. He talked about
himself and his partnership in the firm, and about how damned hard
they all had to work, and about PERSEVERANCE. Throughout all this
boisterous talk, I watched his eyes. Some people can be that
devoted to work and it’s great—you can feel the love of their job
radiating out from them. Others, or Terry Bronk, mainly, just say
these things to justify being the deadly combination of a
workaholic and a procrastinator.

“
Don’t you want to ask me anything?” I
managed to say at one point.

He acted rather put out by the idea that he,
a partner of the firm, would waste his time asking questions of me,
a mere interviewee. Gruffly he said, “I assume Donna’s already
checked your skill set, or she wouldn’t have bothered to bring you
to me.”

Bring me to him? Like I was his lunch or a
harem girl? I had to sit and listen to him for another twenty
minutes before he released me back into Donna’s care. I could have
kissed her when I saw her again. As she walked me back through the
then-unfamiliar halls of the firm, I noticed a woman seated outside
Terry Bronk’s door, answering the phone.

When I asked who that was, she said, “That’s
Terry’s secretary.”

Okay, wasn’t that the job I’d just
interviewed for? “Is she leaving?” I asked.

“
Oh, no. She’s really more of his
executive assistant. Terry usually has several people working for
him. So, what did you think?”

I’d been through too much hell at work to
even pretend I’d tolerate it again. I shook my head. “No, he’s not
for me.”

She looked crushed, which made me feel bad.
“Why not?”

“
I’m sorry. I get a real bad vibe…” and
here I almost said “from him” but instead I finished, “…that the
two of us have different work styles.”

Something flickered through her eyes and she
confided, “He can be pretty high-maintenance.”

Bingo. I knew it. “High-maintenance” is the
code-word for “asshole.”

“
We do have another position open,”
Donna said, with an undertone suggesting she hated to even mention
it. “Our estate attorney needs a secretary.”

I wondered what worried her so, what made her
shy away from showing me to this next guy after the
high-maintenance monster she’d just pushed me toward. Could the
estate attorney possibly be worse? She saw my expression and said,
“It’s just that Bill is very detail-oriented, and he’s gone through
a lot of secretaries. It’s been difficult to find someone who’s a
good match for him, as he has some peculiar tendencies.”

This was significant. Donna, as the office
manager, was overstepping a huge boundary by confessing to me
outright that an attorney was hard to work for. I wanted to meet
this guy now, strictly out of curiosity. “I’d like to talk to him,”
I said, “if he has time.”

He had time. But Donna was unconvinced. She
took me to Bill Nestor’s office and said at the doorway, “Just call
me when you’re finished,” with the implication that we’d be
finished with each other very soon.

The first thing I noticed was the neatness of
his office. The lack of files and paper could make someone think he
didn’t work at all. It took me a moment to find the man behind the
desk, who was as neat and bland as his office and blended fairly
well into the wall. He rose and came to shake my hand, looking
embarrassed that he’d been forced on me.

He said, “My secretary just quit because I
drove her crazy.”

I blinked in surprise.

Bill said, “I’ve been through three
secretaries this year. They all end up quitting or transferring
away from me.”

Okay, I was willing to play along. Obviously
I’d caught him in that state of utter honesty that only comes about
after extreme frustration. I was in the same state, being newly
divorced and unemployed, and I was willing to bet I could match him
frustration for frustration. So I asked, “Why do they quit?”

“
Because I’m inflexible, this last one
said.” From his desk he produced a document so neatly formatted,
right down to its precisely parallel staples, that I yearned to
touch it. Dryly he went through a list of requirements for his
paperwork. I found it all rather fascinating. The man knew exactly
what he wanted.

We spoke for a while about what he wanted.
And it didn’t take me many minutes to begin to see the source of
his problem. He wasn’t just detail oriented. He was detail
obsessed, to the extent that I guessed, correctly, that he had an
actual mental disorder. Yet what I also saw was that the parameters
of his obsession didn’t change. That can be a seductive quality to
a woman who’d just quit working for a guy who contradicted himself
almost hourly and shouted when she couldn’t keep up. This one
didn’t seem like a shouter.

“
I don’t adapt well to change. I don’t
cope well with stress.” Bill continued to list things that would
convince me not to work for him. His last secretary must have
really done a number on him.