Termination Man: a novel (45 page)

“Welcome to my humble abode.” she said, as I eased her into the chair closest to the door, a well-worn recliner.

Lucy’s apartment was a textbook example of thirtysomething spinster interior decorating: There were macramé wall hangings and embroidered pictures of pastoral scenes, flowers, and cats. She had made many of them herself, I suspected. Lucy was a good housekeeper: despite the almost cloying quaintness of her place, there was little in the way of random clutter.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” she announced. “Maybe I should take an Alka-Seltzer. I need to get out of this coat, too.”

“Yes, why don’t you do that?”

I didn’t want to leave without making sure that Lucy was okay, so I took a seat on the living room sofa while Lucy hung up her coat and went into the adjacent kitchen. I heard her draw a glass of water from the tap and drop an Alka-Seltzer tablet into it with a plunk and a fizz.

While I was waiting, I noticed an unusual paperweight sitting on Lucy's coffee table. It was shaped like a dollar sign.

I lifted the brass object as Lucy was walking back into the living room.

“This looks like a paperweight that Ayn Rand would have loved,” I said, referring to the author of
Atlas Shrugged
. The dollar sign had been a recurring symbol throughout Rand’s 1958 novel, a paean to free-market capitalism and individualism.

“Ayn Rand?” she asked. Then she looked at the paperweight and understood the significance of my remark. I gave her points for that. Some people loved Ayn Rand’s works, others hated them. But only a reasonably educated and literate person would be able to connect a dollar sign to the late Russian-American author. “Oh, no. That’s got nothing to do with Ayn Rand. I’ve had that since college. I worked part-time in a bank back then. It was my one-year service gift.”

“Hmm,” I examined the paperweight in my hand. It had a pleasing heft.

“Why don’t you take it, if it strikes your fancy? Really, Craig. I want you to have it.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes, I’m serious,” she said. “Go ahead and take it. You’ll be doing me a favor, in fact. I’ve never really liked this paperweight. If you take it, then I’ll have an excuse to go out and buy something nicer to replace it. And you’ll be doing me a favor in another way, as well: If you take the paperweight, then I won’t feel as badly about your going out of your way to take me home tonight.”

“Fair enough,” I said, pocketing the spur-of-the-moment gift. I understood exactly what Lucy was saying. If I refused her offer, then it would make her feel worse about accepting mine.

“Do you need me to give you a ride back to the Elk Lodge to pick up your car tomorrow morning?” I asked. “It wouldn’t be any trouble.” I swept my arm around the room. “And maybe I would come out of the deal with a picture of a tulip or a cat.”

“No, no. That won’t be necessary. My downstairs neighbor, Jenny will take me. She owes me, anyway.”

“Good enough,” I said. “But feel free to give me a call if Jenny’s busy tomorrow, visiting her parents or taking her kids to soccer practice, or whatever.”

Lucy paused, obviously contemplating my last comment. I saw her lips begin to tremble. Then she burst into tears.

“What?” I asked. Nonplussed at Lucy’s outburst, I simply stood there in the middle of Lucy’s living room. I have never been very good with tears. I figured that she would tell me what was wrong—if she wanted me to know.

“I feel so alone!” she finally said through her sobs.

I walked over to where she was sitting and took a seat beside her. I leaned over and put my arm around her shoulder. “Easy, there, Lucy. What’s wrong?”

“Oh,” she said, still sobbing, her face in her hands. “It’s what you just said about Jenny visiting her parents or taking her kids to soccer practice. I can’t do either, you see.”

I let her cry for about a minute longer. Then she finally finished crying and wiped her eyes.   

“I’m sorry, Craig, dumping all this on you.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “Alcohol makes most people emotional.” I smiled. “That’s one reason why I don’t drink much anymore.”

“No, it’s more than just the wine,” she said. “Do you want me to explain?”

“I’ll leave that up to you. I don't want to make you feel even worse. Is this about not being married? Not having children? Don’t worry, Lucy, you’ve got plenty of time for that yet.”

“I’m thirty-four,” she said. “My biological clock is ticking. And I haven’t had a date in three years. Do you know how hard it is for a woman over thirty who has a weight problem to find a decent man?”

“No,” I said. I didn’t, really—though I could imagine.

“It’s difficult,” she said. “All men want are the young thin ones. Like that new one at work, Claire.”

“I think Claire’s about your age,” I said.

Lucy gave me a
don’t-be-ridiculous
frown. I didn’t press the point. True, Lucy and Claire were more or less the same age. But Claire was fit and stunning, whereas Lucy was, well—average and ordinary-looking. And her often timid, self-conscious personality probably didn’t help matters when she ventured out into the singles marketplace.

“I sense myself becoming more and more isolated each year,” she said. “No husband, no kids, no family. My parents are dead. They started late. I was born when they were in their forties; and they were already old by the time I was in college.”

“You don’t have any other family?” I asked.

“I have a sister. Her name is Emily. But I seldom talk to her and almost never see her.”

“And why’s that?”

“She’s different.”

“How do you mean, ‘different’?”

“What I mean,” Lucy said. “Is that she’s tall and pretty, and she has a tall and handsome husband who loves her.” She sniffed and gave me a forced smile. “You might say that Emily landed on the favored side of the family gene pool. And Emily lives in San Francisco—two thousand miles away. ”

“Well, for what it’s worth,” I said. “I think you’re pretty ‘favored,’ as you put it. Pretty special.”

“Sweet of you to say so, Craig. But most of the time I don't feel very special. Not when I have to share the world with women like Claire. Sometimes it gets to me, you know. All of it: being alone, being fat and ordinary. One time it really got me down, and I did something bad. I was only nineteen then. But still…”

“What are you talking about?”

“This is something that I’ve never told anyone,” she said. “Not anyone at work, I mean.” She wiped her eyes with one hand. “But I trust you. You’re the
only
one I trust—now that Alan is gone. So I guess it’s okay for me to tell you. When I was nineteen, the summer after my freshman year in high school, I got really depressed, and I took a bunch of sleeping pills with half a bottle of wine.”

“Let me get this straight—you tried to kill yourself when you were a teenager?”

“That’s right. I think that clinical depression runs in my family. My mom used to tell me that my grandmother was always a gloomy one. And my great-aunt killed herself with pills when she was about my age. I never got the whole story on that: People were ashamed of suicides back in those days. They didn’t talk openly about it, you know?”

“But you would never do anything like that again,
would you,
Lucy?”

She shrugged. “For a long time I’d thought I was past all that. And maybe I was. Throughout most of my twenties, I was able to remain optimistic, to think that something or someone would come my way. That my life might change. But I’ve been spiraling downward again this year.”

She sobbed once more, wiped her face on a fresh Kleenex, and leaned against my shoulder. If it had been any other woman but Lucy, I would have sworn that there was something romantic about the gesture, but it wasn’t like that. Lucy now regarded me as an older brother, a best friend. Her walls were completely down and her thoughts were laid bare for me.

What was it Alan had said?
Lucy is like an open book
.

A book that Craig Walker Consulting and TP Automotive were preparing to set afire.

I had planned to return to my own hotel room that night; but Lucy’s sobs—and the story of her teenage suicide attempt—had changed my plans. Instead I headed toward the hotel where Claire was staying. I had to talk to her.

I had given Claire the lead role in building the case against Lucy, as I had been primarily responsible for the strategies regarding Nick King, Michael O’Rourke, and Alan Ferguson. Lucy was the last item on our checklist. With her termination, Craig Walker Consulting’s work at UP&S would be done.

Given the complications that had arisen, I needed to wrap up this assignment and vacate the UP&S job site. I had already decided that I wouldn't abandon Donna Chalmers; but I was vulnerable and compromised as a TP Automotive consultant with an active contract. I needed to finish up matters at UP&S; then neither Kurt Myers nor anyone else from TP Automotive would have a claim on my time, efforts, or loyalties.

But I had decided tonight that we couldn’t pull the trigger on Lucy. Not yet—and not this way.

I was all for getting the wrong people off the organizational bus. I knew how necessary it could be. And it was a trigger that I had pulled many, many times before. But most of those people had been self-assertive malcontents. Many of them went out of their way to thumb their noses at management. In a way, many of my previous targets had practically begged to be fired. They disliked their jobs, detested their bosses, and hated themselves for settling for the mediocrity of their positions. As a result, they weren’t really sorry to lose those jobs—not beyond the temporary inconvenience of being fired. That was one of the ideas that had always allowed me to sleep at night: the idea that Craig Walker Consulting was serving the higher cause of market efficiency.

But Lucy was different: She was weak, she had a limited concept of herself, and she had few internal or external resources to rely upon. Lucy was a woman who had already made one suicide attempt, and she was now teetering on the edge of an emotional precipice.

There had to be another way to do this: Perhaps we could take her aside and explain the score to her—maybe even arrange a sit-down with Beth Fisk. I knew that the TP Automotive team would have objections.
But why were we taking down Lucy Browning, for goodness sake?
She was a shy, diffident woman who had zero self-confidence. She wasn’t going to start a revolution at UP&S. She wasn’t a threat to anyone.

My first step would be to talk to Claire, though. I didn’t know exactly how far she had gotten. For several days I had been meaning to meet with her for an update. I had been busy, though, with my own part of the job—and with the trouble over Shawn.

As I pulled into the hotel parking lot, I could anticipate Claire’s response to the change in plans.  Claire would protest, of course. She was headstrong and eager to prove herself. And I would listen to her objections as she enumerated them one by one. Then I would overrule her. First of all, because sparing Lucy Browning was the right thing to do. And there was another reason as well—the only one that really made a difference in the final analysis: At the end of the day, I was still the boss when it came to decisions affecting the operational details of Craig Walker Consulting
,
LLC. I listened to opposing viewpoints, and then I decided. That is what bosses do.

I was driving past the door to Claire’s first-floor hotel room, planning to swing the car back around and park it in a spot directly in front of her door. That was when the door to Claire’s room opened, and I realized that I would not be the first person to pay Claire a visit tonight.

There was no mistaking the identity of the man who was leaving Claire's hotel room. Although I had known him for only a few weeks, I would have recognized Shawn Myers anywhere.

Shawn smiled back at Claire as she closed the door behind him. He was buttoning the top two buttons of his shirt. Just as there could be no mistake about Shawn’s identity, there could be no mistake about what had transpired between them. It has always been my habit to face bad news head-on; and this was a piece of very bad news that I was suddenly forced to face. My employee, Claire Turner, was sleeping with my enemy.

I slowed the Camry to a near idle. I could see Shawn clearly; he was too absorbed in the moment to notice me. My willingness to face the facts here didn’t blunt their effect. A wholly unpleasant mixture of feelings rushed through me, making me almost physically ill. The first component of this was the normal male resentment of the betrayal. The relationship between Claire and me was not the conventional girlfriend-boyfriend thing. However, there was at least an implied exclusivity about—
what would you call it?
—our “arrangement.”

If she was unhappy or unsatisfied, she could have told me before she strayed behind my back. I wouldn’t have been a jerk about it. I wouldn't have threatened her job or anything like that. I knew—just as she did—that I could find other women if I wanted to.

It wasn’t simply the fact that Claire had chosen another man over me—or in addition to me. The problem was her particular choice. Of all the men she could have chosen to sleep with, Shawn was an only slightly less offensive choice than the latest Middle Eastern terrorist. Like me, Claire had no trouble attracting the interest of the opposite sex. She didn’t need to scrape the bottom of the barrel by taking up with Shawn Myers.