My Boss is A Dead Man Read online

  My Boss is A Dead Man

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  What others are saying about My Boss is a Serial Killer,

  the debut Carol Frank novel by Christina Harlin:

  "Paralegal Harlin pulls out all the stops in this witty, catty and romantic mystery debut . . . Harlin's memorable, entertaining characters populate a well-crafted mystery that keeps readers guessing to the end."

  Publisher’s Weekly (February 2, 2009)

  "Mixing hot suspense, sexy romance, and wonderfully quirky characters, Harlin's My Boss is a Serial Killer is one for the keeper shelf."

  Gemma Halliday, author of the High Heels series

  My Boss is a Dead Man:

  A Tale of Passion, Greed and Job Interviews

  Christina Harlin

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2011 Christina Harlin

  Visit the author at http://www.christinaharlin.com

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Chapter One

  The woman I was interviewing had just stolen something off my desk. I caught the movement out of the corner of my eye and then realized that she’d been taking things almost since the minute she’d walked through my door.

  I had read many how-to books on conducting interviews. In none of them had the topic of “What to Do When Your Interview Starts Stealing Things From Your Desk” been addressed. I hated those stupid books.

  When I accepted the job title of office manager, I had known one of the responsibilities would be interviewing prospective employees, but that, like many other real officer manager responsibilities, had seemed like a far-away problem, to be dealt with after we coped with the more immediate troubles of buying furniture and finding an office to put it in.

  Really, my job change was more in the style of a sweeping gesture of rebellion than it was a real promotion. Even when my boss Bill and I moved into our new office, which took a couple months, and even when we started operating our own little law firm, which took a couple more months, I still labored under the impression that I was an office manager in title only. My actual job was still to be Bill Nestor’s secretary, and I could call myself the office manager, the file clerk, the front desk receptionist, the controller, the accountant, the payroll executive, and any other title I could think up. “Strategic Clerical Implementation Manager,” for example.

  Then to my amazement we took on some employees—rather, I should say, a bunch of employees came scrambling for us—and suddenly I was expected to be a real live office manager (with a nameplate on the door of my office that said “Carol Frank – Office Manager”) and damned if that didn’t eventually include conducting interviews. So I got the how-to books and tried to learn how-to do this, and found that as usual, something happened to me that wasn’t in the manual.

  On this particularly hot Thursday in early August, I conducted two job interviews.

  The first was for the position of Bill Nestor’s secretary. His former secretary (me) was now the office manager (me) and was no longer expected to type his letters. Except someone had to. And so here was Justine Carson, the fifth young woman I’d interviewed in as many days. What did this mean? It meant she was the fifth job interview I’d conducted, ever.

  She was the most promising of the bunch thus far, I thought, at least until I realized she was stealing things. Her resume boasted some excellent skill sets, and she was able to back them up with competent knowledge of word processors and office procedures. What was more immediately impressive was how neat and manicured she appeared, with the collar of her blouse pressed, and the flawless lines of her dark blue business suit. Bill liked neatness. And she was very neat; I began to fear she was a little more neat than we could afford. I guessed Justine to be about my age (I was thirty), maybe a bit younger, a trim and polished blonde, her hair cut in one of the neatest bobs I’d ever seen. Despite her impeccable lines, I felt comfortable talking to her, a good sign. We’d been getting along really well since she’d come in: one of those interviews that starts out formally and then just dissolves into friendly companionship.

  “Here’s the thing about Bill,” I had been saying to her. “He’s just the nicest guy in the world. A really great guy. Never shouts, never treats anyone unfairly, and really appreciates his staff.”

  “Sounds too good to be true,” said the wide-eyed Justine.

  “It is,” I agreed. “He has obsessive-compulsive disorder of moderate severity which makes him very detail-oriented.”

  Her eyebrows went up; she had heard this term before. “Detail-oriented” is a warning signal secretaries pass from one to the other, code words that indicated a lawyer could be a real pain in the ass. Not as bad as the deadly phrase “high-maintenance,” but still a red flag. I hurried to reassure her. “Not that kind of detail-oriented. I mean that literally. He’s fussy about having everything done the same way every time, and if you don’t have a firm hand with him, he’ll pick a letter to death, rewrite after rewrite. After a while it can become tiresome, if you don’t have a right frame of mind.”

  Justine asked what might be the right frame of mind, and I said, “Patience, for one thing. Lots of patience. A good sense of humor. A high tolerance for repetition.”

  “Well, that’s about all there is to being a secretary, sometimes.”

  “But here’s a positive note,” I continued. “Since Bill and I opened this law firm together, he’s been in therapy. This is not confidential; he insists I tell interviewees about this. The therapy was one of my conditions. I was not about to go into business with an obsessive-compulsive unless he was making a real effort to curb the worst of it. So he’s on medication for the disorder, he goes to behavior therapy once a week, and attends a support group. He really is making some significant improvements. He’s still fussy over details, straight lines and even surfaces, but there have been no big breakdowns in weeks. If you decide you want to interview with Bill himself, he’ll be happy to tell you all about it. He loves to talk about his treatment program.”

  Justine chuckled under her breath. This interview was going better than she’d expected, too. She pointed up at the wallpaper trim in my little office. It was pink with seashells, which matched the pale pink paint. “That’s really nice. Your whole office is pretty. Was it like this when you rented, or . . .?”

  “The décor is my doing,” I said, turning to admire it again. My office was a good deal more girly that you might expect from me, and maybe in a couple years I’d get embarrassed and change it. But when we’d moved in here and I’d been surrounded by bland taupe walls, I’d decided to assert some kind of friendly feminine influence. Now the room looked like a birthday cake laced with crystal frosting.

  Justine was referring to my rose-pink walls with their seashell trim, which wasn’t perhaps the most business-like color, but
Bill had told me I could have whatever color I liked. Once we’d done the walls that way, I filled the space with as much glass and crystal as I could find. My desk was a glass dining table that I’d found at a thrift store for thirty dollars, but in the rosy room it looked quite expensive. Another thrift store produced my glass shelves and a few more weekends of flea-marketing let me find a number of useless crystal and glass paperweights that I set around the room. There was a particularly dense gathering on the top shelf my glass bookstand, so the sunlight caught them in just the right way to send prisms around the room: a globe, an obelisk, two cubes, a pyramid and a monolith. It looked like a miniature glass city up there, just as pretty as anything. One day I had come in to find Barrel-Of-Monkeys monkeys placed around the monolith, like in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Too bad they had to be returned to Olive’s grandson, or I would have kept them there.

  Anyway my office sparkled. But my goal had been a room that defied any office menace. Offices are grey and soul-sapping if you’re not careful. Oh, get this—I also kept a jar of candy on the corner of my desk. I took my inspiration from my former office manager Donna, who was like a mom for all the staff. One could go into her office and feel like she was just going to take care of everything, because she was swell, but also because of the candy on her desk. Candy can cure many troubles. Thus, candy, birthday cake, sparkly crystal. Go see Carol to feel the love.

  “Offices lean toward the grey, and this is my first real office, and I wasn’t having it,” I said. I turned back to Justine and looked over her resume again, felt for my personalized pen so I could make some notations, couldn’t find the pen, searched around on the floor and under my keyboard, muttered a PG-rated curse and grabbed a pencil instead.

  “Everything at Holton Burke looks the same,” she mused. “Not grey, but brass and oak. Which is beautiful the first few weeks and then kind of oppressive after that. A pink office would be a nice switch there.”

  “So you’ve been at Holton Burke for three years. Like it over there?”

  “It’s a very good firm and I’ve been very happy there. I just feel it’s time for a change.”

  That was more code. One doesn’t want to pop into a job interview spouting venom about one’s current employer. And so, it is just “time for a change.” Her answer was not precisely what I’d been fishing for; I actually wanted to know if she was coming from some swank environment that would make our little firm seem tacky or far too laid-back. I’d heard that Holton Burke was a bunch of snots and made everybody wear suits every day. I went there once to accompany a former boss (who was a psychotic sadist, but that’s beside the point) to a meeting. Though it was “casual” Friday, and I saw no less than thirty blonde clones wearing the same black dress shirt with khaki slacks and/or skirts. So what I’m saying is, when casual Friday looks like everyone’s about to go fox-hunting, Tally-ho, you know you’re in a swanky place.

  Still, her comment had caught my attention and I looked to her with sympathy. “What is it, a high-maintenance lawyer? You can tell the truth. I used to work for one myself.”

  Justine wavered on the edge of tact and then groaned in misery and/or relief. “She’s a monster. Out of her mind. People are terrified of her. I’m terrified of her. I can’t take it anymore.”

  “I understand.”

  “She makes all kinds of mistakes and then blames me for not catching them.”

  “Ew.”

  “She has no idea how to use her computer but she thinks she knows everything, so she’s always screwing up our documents.”

  “And then you have to fix them?”

  “And then I’m blamed for the troubles and she refuses to believe she needs any advice, or training on how to use the programs. She shouts at the IT people. She shouts at me in front of everybody. And the other women there . . . it’s like I’m an outcast. They hate me.”

  She caught herself suddenly, as if she feared she said too much. Justine rose and paced, pausing to look out my window. Not a great view. But everybody knows that a window in your office makes you something of a muckity-muck, even if all you really have to view is a multi-storied parking garage. She observed with interest my bulletin board, which currently displayed a number of photographs I’d taken of Bill’s and my early days here, as we labored to turn it all into our own workable office.

  After looking at the photos for a long while, Justine said, “I’ve just tried so hard. Nothing ever pleases her. Holton Burke has a great set of benefits, but it’s not worth it anymore.”

  I glanced further down the page to reaffirm in my mind how much she wanted in salary. It was a bit more than we could afford to pay her, and I might as well be honest about it. She listened to my confession without looking overly offended.

  “You’re a fairly new firm, didn’t you say?”

  “We split off from Markitt, Bronk, Simms & Kowalsky about five months ago. They’re on the tenth floor.”

  Yes, it’s true, we were all of three floors down from MBS&K, in the Plaza Tower on the Kansas City Plaza. The benefits of this arrangement outweighed the social discomfort. Our commutes had not changed, and we knew the area already. There was also the bonus that I was about to describe to Justine. “At first it was just me and Bill, but I guess since we’re so close to our old office, a fair number of employees there have slipped downstairs and started with us. It’s like a civil war in the building, except everybody’s very, um, civil about it.”

  “You don’t pay as well as they do?”

  “No, we can’t afford to yet.”

  “Yet people are still coming to you.”

  “Our management style is a little different.” This was all I could permit myself to say. It was not polite, for example, to say that Bill was a kind and generous boss whereas Terry Bronk, the dictator of MBS&K, was an iron-fisted procrastinating control-freak who never met a lecture he didn’t like. But for two months now, MBS&K staff had been tunneling under the wall and showing up on our doorstep, two different lawyers with their assistants, and my friend Lucille, now our own southern-belle receptionist, ha ha, and Lloyd, the evil file-room troll who was scary and mean but, for some reason, utterly devoted to Bill Nestor. They both took pay cuts to come here. Bill, gallant soul that he was, said we would try to remedy that situation as soon as possible.

  Not dissuaded by the idea of a lesser salary, Justine returned to the chair before me and asked what might be a typical day with Bill, what kind of work he did. I turned to my file cabinet to get some examples of his work. I did like this woman. She asked all the right questions. Plus, I enjoyed the idea of rescuing her from a bad boss. Fishing around, I came up with his letter template and the sample estate documents that curled Bill’s toes with happiness, then I turned back to Justine. I caught her leaning over the side of the chair, dropping something into her big tote bag. She straightened and waited expectantly; I showed her the documents.

  I looked around for my pink staple-remover and couldn’t find it, pulled a staple with my thumb-nail, stabbed the pad of my thumb, and while I was nursing it I started to have a sort of unpleasant notion about the things on my desk that were missing. I looked toward my window, where she’d been standing a minute ago, and saw that one of my pinned-up instant photos was missing from the bulletin board.

  I peered at Justine. She smiled, ever brightly.

  “Justine, are you swiping things out of my office?”

  Her expression did not change in the slightest. “No.”

  “You haven’t picked up my picture over there, or my staple remover . . . or my pen?”

  “Hmm? Pen? No.”

  “But I just saw you drop something into your bag.”

  “Cell phone.”

  “But . . .” I folded my hands on my desk. If she had become outraged or flustered I might have actually believed her, but she looked pure as the driven snow and not concerned in the least about my accusations. I sighed. “Do you know how hard it is to find pink office supplies?”

  “Is it prett
y hard?”

  “Almost has hard as finding a red Swingline stapler, these days. And that pen? My boyfriend gave me that pen. It’s personalized; it says ‘Carol My-Last-Name-Is Frank.’ Kind of an in-joke between us. I’d really, really hate to lose it.”

  Justine’s posture had begun to sink as I spoke.

  I pointed to my bulletin board. “I took those pictures the first week Bill and I moved in here. You know we had to do all the remodeling work ourselves? We couldn’t afford contractors. We had a couple of disagreements that almost came to blows and then we’d make up and laugh about it. I love those pictures.”

  I wasn’t angry; anger is not an emotion that comes to me easily because I’m too lazy for it. I realized later that anger was a reaction Justine expected and was prepared for. Instead, my hopeful explanations of why I wanted my things back seemed to undo her.

  Justine buried her face in her hands, sobbing suddenly and uncontrollably. She wailed something. It took two more repetitions of the wailing before I understood what she was saying. “This always happens to me when I like someone!” Snuffling she reached for my box of tissues (also pink) and blew her nose loudly, wiped at her streaming eyes. Between hiccups she cried, “I’m a compulsive kleptomaniac and I steal things from people I like. It’s a sign of affection. You’ve been so nice to me.”

  I chewed my lower lip, considering. “So, is this why you’re leaving Holton Burke?”

  “I never steal at Holton Burke. I hate those people.”

  “Oh, that is kind of ironic.”

  “Here, here. I’m sorry.” From her skirt pocket she withdrew my photograph, and from her bag she retrieved my silver pen and my pink staple-remover, and a magnet from my file cabinet that I hadn’t even missed yet. When had she managed to take that? I couldn’t help but comment. “You’re so fast! How did you ever get these things without my noticing?”