The Supervisor (2 page)

“Well, you can, but there ain’t much meat,” he replied frankly.

Many people hunt for “sport”; killing for the sake of some trophy, or perhaps as a form of controlling animal populations in particular habitats. This I knew. It was one aspect about hunting that never appealed to me, but I knew it was common practice. The fact that his dead squirrels apparently fell into that category wasn’t what struck me as alarming, but rather how Ted went on about that day, and the general attitude he conveyed through his expressions. I realized then, in a sudden, unnerving fashion, that Ted enjoyed killing things…just for the sake of killing.

…
Serial killers, for some deranged reason, take great pleasure in murdering life’s little creatures.
I had heard that once, somewhere, years ago. They were the kind of words that always stuck with a person, summoned to the forefront of their thoughts at various times from conversations, or perhaps by headlines of the evening’s news. They were certainly the words summoned to the forefront of my thoughts then, as Ted gazed at that photograph, reminiscing as he did.

A sudden chill swept over me. Halloween Friday…that following Monday.
So how do you like me now, Dan?
The miserable events of those days came whistling back to me like a train barreling through a tunnel. I was both disappointed, and disturbed.
No, Ted wasn’t going to “show me the hunting ropes” and yes, Ted just may be a real life killer!

My thoughts went foggy. I wiped my hands on my pant legs, trying to rid them of their sudden clamminess as I felt the racing of my heartbeat echo in my ears. My neighbor Bob had panic attacks. He used to tell me all about them on Sunday morning, after church. The sweaty palms…difficulty breathing… ‟Like a little mini-heart attack, Dan!” he used to say. That’s how I felt then, as Ted kept going on about those damn squirrels. I ended our conversation abruptly, on the premise that I had a ton of emails to get back to, and made my way out of his office with as much couth as possible.

“Anytime you wanna go shooting, Dan…” he offered again, on my way out.

* * *

My wife, Veronica, was an incredible cook. I mean,
incredible
. Not only could she make the best Mexican food you would ever taste in your life, but she also had a flare for creating those extreme-cuisine dishes; ones that would cost you nothing short of a hundred dollars a plate in a fancy restaurant near downtown Seattle. I would often joke with her that if she ever decided to open a restaurant, she’d put half her competition in all of Seattle out of business. She learned her art from her mother, Lucille, who actually did run a restaurant, in San Diego, before she passed away ten years ago. Our young daughters, Josephine and the twins Maria and Anabella, also loved Veronica’s cooking and would often help out in the kitchen as much as they could, but mostly, they were in charge of keeping me and my sneaky fingers out. It was a wonderful family game we participated in almost every night. But when I got home that evening, the “dead squirrel evening,” I found that I had little appetite for much of anything. At the table, my thoughts kept wandering back to Ted. I tried to put my suspicions about him out of my mind, but it seemed an impossible thing to do. Not once in all my life had I entertained the idea of being…so close to a murderer.

It was all my imagination. I was working myself up over nothing. I had to be. Ted was just an asshole; a bully who liked to impose his will on everyone. Everything, for that matter. I kept telling myself this at least.

“What’s wrong, hon?”

Veronica’s words broke the spell I was under. I shrugged it off as nothing, just a lot on my mind from the office and all. What could I say?
Oh, sweetie…I just think Ted is a murderer, that’s all.
I had never mentioned to Veronica my concerns about Ted. It was a regular habit for me to keep my work-related stress away from my family life, and the fact that I thought my supervisor might be a real-life serial killer, well…‟work-related stress,” right?

Things turned even more frightfully upsetting for me about a week later. Veronica was a goddess. She had one of those metabolisms that wouldn’t quit, the kind that made us “stocky” people complain. And even after all that rich food she would cook and eat, the fact that she gave birth to three children, and the fact that she was in her mid-forties, she still looked as fit and gorgeous as she did when I first met her, fifteen years ago. Men loved to look at her, and the brave ones would often approach her and flirt with her. Much to my pleasure, she would flirt back. It never bothered me, as I wasn’t the jealous type. I knew I was a lucky man. I flaunted it.

This wasn’t the case, however, when she came to the office one afternoon to drop off a client-folder I had left at the house. As I walked up to the front desk to meet Veronica, to my great horror I found her, Ted, and our receptionist Jennifer all laughing exuberantly, like college roommates at some party. Jennifer was only halfway into the merriment, obviously a little uncomfortable with the whole “chummy” thing Ted was putting out. But Veronica, on the other hand, was blushed in the face, running her fingers through her long black hair as she laughed along to Ted’s charming behavior.

I watched them in terror from behind a corner. I wasn’t jealous so much as I was dreadfully alarmed. My wife knew nothing about Ted, and he knew nothing about her, but right then and there they were both getting to know a little bit about each other. Fury and terror swept over me. I quickly broke into the scene, coughing uncomfortably to announce my arrival as I walked into the lobby. The subsequent moment reminded me of a trailer from one of those Hollywood blockbusters, a suspense thriller starring Harrison Ford: Jennifer slipped out of the scene, while Ted and my wife slowly turned their heads in my direction, reluctant it seemed to break away from the stare they were both sharing. Their eyes, giddy with laughter and underlined with huge smiles, fell upon me…

And then, everything turned red. My palms sprouted beads of sweat, the hair down my neck rose in alarm, yet my knees began to buckle as once again, Ted became my “pal.” He began saying stupid things like, “How’d you get so lucky, Dan?” and “For the love of God, steal paradise while you’re at it,” referring to my wife, who of course was loving the attention. Perhaps the moment was all good-natured, but I really wanted to swing an ice pick into the man’s skull. He went on with other things as well, being grossly reasonable about the folder I left at home, even bringing up other projects he knew I was fretting over, telling me not to worry about “so and so,” he’d give them a call… My hero, Ted, here to save me from my predicaments under the captivated attention of my wife.

For quite some time afterward, Ted was my “buddy.” Although he remained oppressive towards my coworkers, any concerns addressed to me were always tactfully overlooked, or dismissed as uncontrollable incidents. Whatever the case, he kept a cool edge with me regarding work and then would occasionally ask when we were going to go shooting, or how the family was. His favorite was a simple, “How’s Veronica, Dan?” It would’ve all been quite dandy and flattering except that now I believed Ted was a psychopath, a real-life murderer walking amongst us. Unfortunately, it was during the unfolding of these events when I believe I made my first
real
mistake with the man.

Ted was a very shrewd person. Obviously, he was more shrewd than any of us at the office gave him credit for, but nonetheless, Ted was human. Because of the overall “creeps” that had enveloped me regarding the man, I naturally failed to reciprocate his chumminess; instead I found myself dodging his probes regarding my family, or when we were going to go out to the shooting range. At some point, this deflective behavior of mine must have irritated Ted, because one day he just quit. He walked past me one morning as I was in the break room pouring myself a cup of coffee, and gave me a look that said all too clearly,
I’m done with you, Dan
. Even a moron could’ve read that look. My hands began to tremble so much that I made a trickling trail of coffee upon the floor on my way back to my desk.
What next?
I thought to myself. To my great dismay, I didn’t have to wait very long to find out.

Not a week later, Ted called me into his office. The buddy talk was over as he matter-of-factly notified me that the office needed to “shed” some hours…

“Things are a little bit slow right now, Dan…” Since I was one of the highest paid employees, Ted reasoned that I would be the first one to sacrifice in the budget for our office. “Go ahead and transfer three of your clients over to Ben.”

I doubt he missed the color of my face when I walked out of the room, as I was steamed with anger. “Only temporary, Dan,” he assured me with a toneless voice, on my way out. Although I didn’t look back at him, I painted the image in my head of Ted sitting there in his chair with a baleful grin upon his face. Not once in the ten years I worked there had anyone’s hours been cut. Right before Christmas? I was truly upset, not just for the sake of financial reasons, but mostly for now being on the “shit-list” of a person I feared was a walking nutcase. In my attempts to stay clear of the Great White, I apparently positioned myself right into his killing zone.

The next day, Ted sent me an email clarifying the details of how my hours would be reduced, stating that it would be just through the rest of December. He ended with a simple,
Say hello to Veronica.
I got the message alright. I was filled with trepidation. I wanted to approach the man and argue against what I knew was an outright distortion of the truth. Our office hadn’t slowed down, we were hopping with work. Ted was just getting back at me for putting him off. But what could I do? Did I dare upset the man anymore? It was my own folly that got me in that predicament, and I was positive that if I pursued my feelings about the matter, I would just make things much worse for myself.

Ultimately, Ted didn’t give me the immediate opportunity to approach him, and I suppose that was his plan all along. He left that afternoon for a five-day seminar in Las Vegas. The tension in the office abruptly broke—bursting like an overcooked sausage— as he drove away, Someone gave a loud hoot from the back room, which generated another hoot from afar, and then another, and before long, the whole office was hooting and hollering, screaming like a nuthouse out of control. At one point Ben stood up on his desk and started singing and dancing, much to all of our amusement. I would be lying if I said it wasn’t a quaint moment of relief for myself, one that I readily accepted by resigning myself to the notion that for the time being, I would just enjoy the brief absence of our supervisor.

I hate myself for that now. I loathe the listless spirit which is encased in my pathetic shell, the “passiveness of my nature” as my wife used to say. What I should have done at that moment, instead of laughing like a fool at Ben Jukowski grinding on his cubicle wall as he sung “Get down on it,” was walk right out that door, and start looking for another job. I should have done that, but I didn’t…

There’s really no way of describing the absolute terror that befell me during the events that transpired after Ted’s return. Over the course of a few weeks, everything seemed to move pretty fast towards what I now deem was the “horrendous finale.” A few days after Ted came back, I was watching television one evening and caught the headlines of a grisly murder in Las Vegas, one that had occurred earlier in the week. The reporter referred to the young woman’s killer as “a primordial butcher, who acted with a style very reminiscent of the infamous Jack the Ripper.” Appropriately enough, the poor woman’s name was Maria London, a fact which the newsman sumptuously repeated several times over in a style
I
couldn’t help but consider very reminiscent of Don Henley’s
Dirty Laundry
, until they finally flashed a recent photo of the victim. Uncontrollably, I stood up out of my chair, a sense of dreadful fright washing over me. I was rendered speechless, as I stared at the woman’s photo in disbelief. Maria London could have been my own wife’s sister!

“He did it,” I told myself. He was there when it happened, he noticed her somewhere in the crowded expanse of Vegas, he stalked her from the depths where only his kind lurked, and he tore at her with such viciousness.

I called in sick the next day. As my wife took the kids to school, then went shopping, I sat at my computer and touched up my resume. I knew I needed to get out of that office, and away from Ted. Out of sight, out of mind—it was my only hope, I reasoned. I contemplated quitting right then, just never go back, but I wasn’t sure if an act so unexpected of my “passive nature,” wouldn’t attract more unwanted attention from a man like him. I thought about how best to orchestrate a timely exit from the quandary I was now in, and probably I thought too much, so that I became paralyzed with inaction. The only thing I did do was send my resume out to a few local businesses, while I contemplated various scenarios and answers to the questions I knew would come:
So why are you leaving us, Dan?

But the first, and real question came the next day at work. “Feeling better?” Ted asked me, as he walked past my cubicle. His voice had a tone of subtle derisiveness, as if he knew why I called in sick. I told myself I was being paranoid, but still avoided the man as best I could for the next few days.

Several days went by uneventfully, and things were beginning to settle down in my head, for I already had two interviews scheduled in response to my job inquiries. I also had developed several good answers to my future inquisition from Ted, which I knew I would receive on the day I walked into his office unexpectedly and handed him my resignation letter. Christmas was right around the corner, everyone seemed to be feeling the spirit, and for the first time in what seemed like months I remember feeling an overwhelming sense of relief. But, then it happened.

The height of my foolishness came to light one late afternoon, just days before Christmas Eve. Ted owned a leather-bound appointment book, as he was oft to say he didn’t trust mechanical devices such as a Blackberry as much he did his own penmanship. On that particular day, I noticed Ted left that book near the sink in the break room and stupidly, I decided to snoop through it. I flipped through the contents, reading various scribblings, notes and appointments, I found nothing the slightest bit alarming. I then rummaged through the back liner-pocket of the book, finding several business cards and brochures and then, crammed deep into the corner of the pocket as if hidden there, a small cocktail napkin. I retrieved the napkin and proceeded to unfold it. On the front, printed in black and pink letters were the words
The Panther Lounge
, but on the back, in red ink and in Ted’s own handwriting, was a phone number followed by:
M. London.