Termination Man: a novel (46 page)

I knew, though, that Claire’s affair with Shawn Myers was probably not a matter of simple lust—at least not on her part. This was what was referred to in the MBA courses we had both taken as a “power-exchange relationship.”

Shawn’s motivation was obvious. Claire’s was more problematic:
What did she have up her sleeve? What had Shawn promised her?
Was she planning to take over the TP Automotive account and then jump to another consulting firm? Or better yet—did Claire Turner intend to start her own consulting firm? Or maybe—despite what she often said about the drudgeries of the corporate insider’s track—Claire was angling for a high-level managerial position inside TP Automotive.

Any and all of the above were possible.

I parked my car where Shawn would not see it, in a space that was sufficiently distant from Claire’s room. I watched Shawn climb into his own vehicle—an Audi A8, a car that stickered at around seventy-eight grand. The son-of-a-bitch had made no attempt to be discreet—he had parked in a space right in front of Claire’s hotel room—right beside the one where I had been planning to park only a minute ago.

As soon as Shawn’s car pulled out of the hotel parking lot, I stepped out of my own, slamming the door a little harder than was necessary. I could feel the blood rushing to my temples as I strode across the pavement. It would not have been a good time for a panhandler to ask me for spare change, or for a motorist to lay on his horn as I crossed the parking lot without looking in either direction. I sensed that my temper was held in check by only a thread right now; and that thread was going to snap at any second.

I burst into Claire’s room without knocking. She hadn’t yet locked the door. When I stepped inside her room, Claire was making up one of the twin beds.

“Did you forget something?” she asked. Then she turned and saw that her unannounced visitor was not Shawn Myers.

“Did
you
forget your common sense?” I asked. I stepped over to the nearest wall and pounded it once with my fist. I was in one of those moods where I had to strike something. It was inevitable. 

Claire quickly assessed the new situation and went on the offensive. Probably she had prepared her lines in advance—figuring that I would find out about her and Shawn sooner or later.

“Don’t look at me like that! Who the hell do you think you are, Craig? I never told you that I was the girl for you to bring home to your parents, did I? Did I ever talk like we were a long-term item?”

“Maybe not. But that doesn’t mean that it’s okay for you to hop into bed with one of our clients!”

“Oh, is this a discussion about professional standards, Craig? Is that any worse than hopping into bed with your employee?”

“Okay, Claire, you’ve got me. I’m no angel. What I’ve been doing with you—what
we’ve
been doing—it’s probably wrong. And no, I don’t have any claim on you. If you want to get a conventional boyfriend or join an Internet dating site, you’ve got my permission. But that’s not what you did. Why did you have to take up with Shawn Myers?”

“What is it between you and that guy, Craig? Why do you have it out for him like that?”

“Shawn Myers is the worst son-of-a-bitch I know right now.”

“And what are you?
A boy scout?
If you wanted to apply for sainthood Craig, you should have put together a different resume.”

I let those comments pass. She was partly right—I wasn’t a saint. But I was no Shawn Myers, either.

“We’re not simply talking about the usual flawed human beings that we work for, Claire. We’re not just talking about using people and getting people fired. Do you know what Shawn is capable of? He’s a rapist, for one thing.”

“Oh, give me a break, Craig. Are you talking about that bullshit with that cleaning woman’s daughter? Shawn told me all about that. It was a misunderstanding. A misunderstanding that got blown totally out of proportion.”

“Well, I can also produce a woman who would tell you that Shawn Myers raped her and beat her up in an alleyway in 1997. And there’s even a possibility that he could be a murderer.”

I realized that I was playing devil’s advocate now. Earlier in the week, I had doubted Tina Shields’s stories about Shawn Myers. I had practically called her a liar, in fact. Now I was taking Tina’s side; and she was not even here to hear to me.

Claire waved me away. “
Murder?
You’re talking nonsense, Craig. I’m surprised at you, really. You don’t like Shawn Myers?
Fine!
You’re mad because I slept with him behind your back?
Got it!
But that doesn’t mean you have to smear him and tell all these ridiculous stories about him. I happen to know Shawn Myers a lot better than you do. And I can tell you that he can really be very nice. Very sweet.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Just like that guy up in Michigan? Jamie, right?”

“That was below the belt, Craig. I opened up to you about my past because you seemed to be legitimately interested, and because I thought you’d understand. Not because I wanted to give you tools to use against me in an argument like this.”

“I’m just saying that you haven’t always shown the best judgment where men are concerned.”

“I slept with you, didn’t I?”

I forced myself to stop before replying to that little barb. I was still angry; but the most intense part of my anger had been spent. And I needed to tread carefully here. My position had already been compromised.

Under normal circumstances, what Claire had done would be considered a grave violation of professional conduct—a firing offense. When you sleep with a client, you expose your employer to all sorts of risk. You compromise the job. But I had erred first by sleeping with my employee—a fact that Claire was not going to let me forget. Nor could I plausibly claim that our trysts had never happened. I thought back on the weeks during which I had been sleeping with Claire. There were numerous emails and text messages that would prove beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt that I had been more than simply her boss, and that she had been more than my employee.

How could I have been so stupid?
What an idiot I was.

Claire had significant leverage over me now—leverage that I had given her. I could discourage her relationship with Shawn; but I could not coerce her into stopping it. If fired her, I would be hearing from an employment lawyer within twenty-four hours.

“Okay, Claire, listen: This isn’t getting us anywhere. We need to discuss this situation between you and Shawn. I think, however, that we both need a cooling off period first. I actually came here to talk to you about something else: Lucy Browning.”

“Oh, yeah. Lucy Browning.” Claire seemed eager to change the subject. “That’s all set up. She’ll be gone on Monday.”

“No. We can’t pull the trigger on Lucy Browning.” 

“But I already have pulled the trigger on Lucy Browning.”

“I told you to wait until we talked!”

Claire shrugged. “Well, excuse me for being proactive about my job. If you didn’t want a self-starter, then you should have hired someone else. I recorded a conversation with Lucy over lunch last week. She basically ran them all down—everyone on the UP&S management team from TP Automotive. They’re all ready to let her go now: Beth, Kurt, Bernie—and yes, Shawn too, just in case you’re wondering.”

“We can’t let that happen!”

Claire threw her hands up in the air. “Well guess what, Craig? I really don’t think that ‘we’ have much of a choice in the matter. Lucy Browning works for UP&S, which means that she works for TP Automotive. Just like you and me. Have you forgotten who the client is here?”

“They’re the people we’re not supposed to sleep with,” I said.

Claire started toward me—ready to scratch my eyes out, I imagine. Then she stopped herself. She put her hands at her sides and clenched her fists.

“Why don’t you get out of here, Craig? Huh? Get the hell out of my room.”

I arrived at UP&S on Monday morning at 7:30 a.m. I had decided that I would buttonhole Beth Fisk first thing, and tell her that there needed to be a change of plans.

I was reasonably certain that I would be able to get my TP Automotive clients to listen to reason. I had already formulated my sales pitch: The firing of an unstable employee could have negative repercussions for the company. Suppose that Lucy were to make another attempt on her life—suppose she were to succeed this time. The resultant PR for TP Automotive could be quite negative. There was another way—a better way. Why wouldn't they agree to ease her out instead of firing her? 

But when I arrived at my desk I saw that Lucy’s desk did not quite look the same. Her few personal effects—a framed photo of her dead parents, a smiley face penholder, and a stone paperweight carved to resemble a cat—were all gone.

I looked around the office. The only person I saw was Mary Lou Hicks in accounting.

“Mary Lou,” I said. “Do you know if Beth Fisk has arrived yet?”

“I saw her a few minutes ago,” Mary Lou said. “I just got here myself. Wait a minute, I’ll check her Lotus Notes calendar for you.”

Mary Lou looked at her computer screen, navigating to Beth Fisk’s online appointment and activity calendar.

“Says she’s in a meeting with Kurt Myers in the executive boardroom. Must be something important.”

“Thank you!”

I ran toward the west wing of the building. The executive boardroom was located down a long carpeted hallway that gave it a certain separation from both the front office and the factory area. When I arrived, the door was closed. There was a narrow strip of glass window panels on either of the door. I saw Kurt and Beth seated at the room’s big round table, talking.

I burst in without knocking.

“Craig, what’s going on?” Kurt began. I had startled him.

“Lucy Browning,” I said. “Was she let go this morning?”

Ever the prim and proper one, Beth Fisk replied in an even tone. “Claire gave me the necessary materials concerning Ms. Browning this past Friday.” She gestured to a small black object amid the papers on the tabletop. It was an MP3 player with a tiny embedded speaker. “I thought that you would be aware. Ms. Browning arrived early this morning, so we decided to go ahead and call her in for the termination meeting.”

“Isn’t that the sort of thing that is usually done at the end of the day?”

“I have some other meetings scheduled for later in the day. And Kurt and I both believed that was imperative to remove Ms. Browning from the team as soon as possible, given the nature of her recorded comments. Have you listened to the conversation on this device, Craig?”

I shook my head. I hadn’t heard it, but I could imagine it. I also assumed that Lucy was never told about the furtively recorded dialogue between herself and Claire. She would have been let go with a vaguer explanation—something to the effect that she was “not a good fit” for the company.

Kurt glanced down at the MP3 recorder on the table. “Well, I did listen to what Ms. Browning said, and I was frankly shocked at her poor attitude. Any employee who feels like that shouldn’t be on the team. You know that, Craig. An attitude like that is detrimental to the morale and esprit de corps of the entire group.”

I couldn’t argue with the fact that Lucy had developed a poor attitude. But who was responsible for that?
Lucy herself—or this man who had placed his possibly sociopathic son in a position of senior leadership over the company?
  

“Ms. Browning was given a severance package,” Beth said. “Three months’ worth of salary and benefits. She had been with the company for almost ten years, after all. So we took care of her. She’ll be able to get back on her feet.”

I thought again about Lucy’s long-ago suicide attempt. She didn’t need their extra paychecks. She needed to have her old world back: the one before the TP Automotive buyout of UP&S—the one in which she worked with her friend, Alan Ferguson, everyday. But that wasn’t something that I could give her. No one could give that world back to her now.

“Okay, I understand,” I said.
There was nothing that I could do now, was there?
Lucy’s employer had already fired her—as they were perfectly within their rights to do. She was on her own. Just like me. Just like Claire. Just like millions of people out there. I couldn’t turn back the calendar, or force TP Automotive to give UP&S back to the investors who had owned it before—the same ones who had allowed it to become unprofitable.

“I’m sorry to have disturbed your meeting,” I said. “There was a little communication gap between Claire and me concerning this issue. It won’t happen again.”

“It’s no trouble,” Kurt said. “Now, if you’ll excuse us, please.”

I shut the door behind me and headed back to the desk of my alias Craig Parker. I would have the purchasing department to myself, with the empty desks of Lucy Browning and Alan Ferguson on either side of me.

After leaving UP&S for the day, I swung by Lucy Browning’s apartment. I had called her cell phone several times during the morning and afternoon. She had not picked up any of my calls.