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| Sunday, March 14, 2010 |
| Hey, CC, can you write a story that can be read in five minutes? |
I dunno, probably...
“If there were any other temp in the whole agency available today, I would be calling them,” Angelina Rossi, senior recruiter for TrustiTemps, was screaming into the phone.
We all have our little talents. James Cameron makes shitty movies, Julia Child cooks coq au vin, and I get fired.
“Since you only have me,” I mumbled, “where am I going?”
“Ronnie Chesterfield’s office. Typing and filing, thirteen an hour.”
“Ronnie Chesterfield? Like Mr. If you don’t get the house I don’t get my fee tv divorce lawyer Ronnie Chesterfield?”
“Just don’t get fired.”
“I won’t. It’s not even possible. How could I possibly get fired working for that sleaze?”
Just after the paralegal left for lunch, Ronnie got a weepy-voiced phone call. Weepy-voiced phone calls are pretty common in the divorce business. At Ronnie’s though, you could never tell if they were weeping over their cheating hubby or weeping over Ronnie, who was probably also cheating.
“Please, please," the woman wailed, "Ronnie needs to come over, right now!”
“Just a moment,” I said, ever the professional “Can I tell Mr. Chesterfield who is calling?”
“Tell him it’s Kitten," the woman stammered.
If I were as a bad a temp as Angelina thinks I am, I would have asked the lady to be more specific, but I just offered Mr. Chesterfield the call. He had me put her through. Five minutes later, he was getting his coat.
“Helen?” he asked.
“It’s Bell,” I said, “Bell or Annabella”
“I’m going to need you to come with me. One of my clients is about to have a bad run-in with her ex-husband. I want a woman along to take pictures of any injuries.”
He paused for a second in front of the mirror to fix his hair.
Kitten, whose name turned out to be Penelope Reed, lived in a Barbie-dream house in one of those gated communities. A perfectly manicured lawn was spoiled only by the dead body sprawled across the front porch and the police car that had taken out a small bank of pink impatiens in its hurry to park. On our way in I got some pictures of the body. Not exactly divorce case material, but they will look great in my scrapbook.
Inside, Kitten was holding court in a living room that looked like it had been designed by a Disney animator after a three day bender. She was draped across a pink loveseat with a skinny rookie cop at her side. A fat Lieutenant was sitting on a pink and white striped sofa. He was eating chocolates out of a box on the white marble coffee table. Mr. Reed must have been a hell of a guy to put up with her decorating alone. The entire room was pink and white, a color scheme marred only by the clashing red roses on the mantelpiece.
“Well, you know I had a restraining order. He comes to my door and he starts pounding on it, commanding me to let him in…I didn’t know what he was going to do with me if I did. I was so terrified. So I called my lawyer, then I went and got the gun I keep for protection, and when I opened the door, he lunged at me…and…”
She broke into deep, heaving sobs. Ronnie ran over to comfort her, but as he was about to touch her hands, a police officer grabbed his wrist.
“We’re going to have to test her for gunshot residue.” The lieutenant said, “but it’s just a formality. This looks like pretty clear self-defense. He was trespassing on your property, Ms. Reed, and you had the restraining order. The lab will want the gunshot residue, but it looks like it’s open and shut.”
“As long as you test the flowers.” I said. The whole room noticed me for the first time.
“What?” one cop said, but everyone else knew what I was talking about. Everyone turned to the flowers on the mantel, the ones that didn’t match, the ones that had no reason to have gunshot residue or blood on them at all—unless they had been plucked from Mr. Reed’s hands after he died. Men who are coming to hurt their ex-wives don’t bring flowers. Men who had been invited over by a wife asking for reconciliation but were met at the door by a wife with a loaded gun just might.
The lieutenant calmly swallowed what was in his mouth, then pulled out an evidence bag for the rest of the box of chocolates.
“Test the roses, Boys” he said.
As we watched the cops load Kitten into the back of the police car, Ronnie Chesterfield was silent. Finally, I said, “Think of it this way, criminal defense could be a whole new line of work for you.”
And that’s when I got fired.Labels: mystery noir |
posted by Chalicechick @ 11:28 PM  |
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| Saturday, March 10, 2007 |
| Carrie...honey |
“Carrie…”
“Shut up, Brad. I don’t want to hear it.”
“I know you don’t. I mean, I know you’re really upset with me.”
“Damn right.”
“The girl, Kendra, she wasn’t… Well…. She was….”
Kendra was one hell of a fabulous lay. That’s what she was. But I couldn’t say that. And Carrie was still looking at me expectantly. Dark, angry eyes were flashing out from underneath the headpiece on her nun costume.
I was dressed as a priest. Carrie was dressed as a nun, an outfit that still showed her pregnancy. We’d been sitting outside the Henderson’s costume party ever since Carrie had casually picked up my cell phone from the floor of the car just as a text message came in.
Now the tears were starting. Carrie was hurt, so hurt, that Kendra had come on to me and I’d had my fun.
“Am I not enough?” she whimpered
“Honey, you are, it’s just…” How could I explain it? How could I make her understand? Did women get the sensation, the incredible excitement of something new? It wasn’t that Carrie was a bad wife. But she was only one woman. “I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“No,” Carrie said, “You didn’t. You just didn’t care.”
I was silent. I had cared. That was why I’d tried so hard to keep her from finding out. But Kendra was always with the “I love you” text messages. Fucking Kendra.
“Do you think you’re a sex addict?” Carrie asked.
“What? Are you crazy? No… I just want some adventure sometimes.”
Carrie looked like she wanted to list off all the adventurous things she’d tried to do to please me. She even opened her mouth. But then she closed it again.
“Let’s go to the party,” I said.
“Now?”
“Why not? Sitting in the car all night isn’t going to change anything. Let’s go to the party. We will have a good time. We’ll be Brad and Carrie, the couple that everyone loves. Later, we will go home and talk about this. I’ll dump Kendra. Hell, maybe I’ll go to sex addicts anonymous. Whatever you need. I just want you to be happy, babe.”
“Then I want your car.”
“What? You have a car.”
“The sexual revolution started because of cars. Suddenly couples had freedom and privacy. You’re not going to have either for a very long time.”
I had to marry a cultural anthropology major. “How will I get to work?” My voice was more of a whine than I wanted it to be.
“I’ll drive you sometimes. When I can’t, you can take the goddamn bus. You might like it, you’d meet a whole new class of trashy girl.”
“Don’t be a bitch.”
“You fuck some teenager and you’re telling me not to be a bitch?”
“Kendra was 23.”
“Give me your keys.” I dug through my pocket and handed them over. Carrie snatched them and shoved them deep into her habit. “Let’s go,” she said.
“Should I take my coat?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t,” Carrie said. “You know how coats disappear at parties sometimes.”
I shoved my gloves into the pockets of my coat and put the coat in the back seat. Carrie let me take her hand as we walked up the front steps.
The Hendersons were old college friends. They’d changed less than we had. While we’d gotten the power jobs and landed a huge house in the suburbs, Maura and Billy were professors and still lived in a modest townhouse, a modest townhouse that was crammed with people. Drunken, happy people. I couldn’t wait for a drink myself.
Maura and Billy were happy to see us. Maura, dressed as a hippie, took Carrie’s arm and pulled her away, saying something about some new African masks Carrie should see. Anthropologists. Who knows?
Cowboy Billy brought me a brewski. “All these girls here your friends, Billy?” I asked. A blonde in a butterfly costume scampered by, laughing. Definitely no bra on that one.
Billy laughed, “They’re mostly Maura’s grad students. But you’re not supposed to be looking at them. Carrie’s having a baby” Billy’s voice was all teasing mock innocence.
“It’s not a crime to look, my man.”
Billy was watching a redheaded woman in a Catwoman costume gyrate around the dance floor.
“Thank God for that.”
Three drinks later, the party had definitely improved. There was still no sign of Carrie. Billy was off talking football with some of the guys. I sat in the corner, just drinking and watching what I couldn’t have. Butterfly costume girl came bouncing up.
“Hello, Father,” she giggled.
“Good evening, my child,” I said. What was the fun of Halloween if you couldn’t be in character?
“I think I have some sins to confess,”
“Well, tell me about them and maybe I’ll grant you absolution.” Butterfly girl bounced up and down, giggling. Surely Carrie wouldn’t have any problem with a little conversation.
“Should we go someplace private so I can confess?”
“Oh, I think you should tell me right here,” I said.
Butterfly slipped onto my lap. “Well, my college roommate is a really sexy woman, and one night when we were both drunk, we ended up…”
My cock was already hard and I was dying to hear the end of the story.
But it wasn’t to be.
“Brad Miller!” My wife Carrie stood in front of us. I unceremoniously dumped Butterfly onto the floor, but it was too late.
“Carrie… honey”
“Find your own way home!”
My pregnant nun turned and stormed out of the house. Everyone was looking at me. Maura looked like the angriest hippie since Nixon was pardoned. Even Billy was rolling his eyes at me. Yeah, yeah. I know. I was the bad guy and no jury would convict my wife for leaving me forever. I did the only thing I could do, which was follow her.
Carrie was pretty fast on her feet for a pregnant woman. She was out and in the driver’s seat before I could get down the steps.
“Can we talk about it?”
She drove off.
Son of a bitch. Son of a filthy whore.
I was stuck in the city outside a party where I wasn’t welcome, with no coat, no phone and no way to get home.
It actually wasn’t that cold and as I walked, I started to calm down a bit. The moon was out, lighting the liquor stores and porn shops I passed. I thought of stopping into the Condom Shack for a magazine, but I figured the priest get-up would freak them out.
I did stop at the window for just a moment, and looking in, I saw myself. Middle-aged guys just looking for some big tits to ogle while they yanked their dicks. I could spin all the crap I wanted about my own sexual liberation, but the truth is I was one of these guys and it was really sort of pathetic. Truth be told, Carrie really did have a point. I was a rat bastard when it came to my relations with the opposite sex. And it must be very scary to be pregnant and wonder if your husband’s about to run off with a 23-year-old.
There were red and blue lights in the distance. Yeah, Carrie, I thought. I get where you’re coming from. It’s a dangerous world. What if I gave you or the baby a disease?
As I got closer to the lights, I saw what looked like a bad accident. Somebody, either the Volvo or the SUV, had run the light and there were pieces of car all over the intersection. A cop came running up.
“Father!” He said. “We have an old woman here, we don’t think she’s going to make it. She’s crying out for a priest.”
“But?”
“Please, Father, I don’t think she will make it until someone else arrives.”
Why not? I was going to hell anyway, and at least I could make one woman feel better tonight. I’d seen enough cop shops with Catholic murder victims. I knew how it went.
“Of course, my child,” I said, following the policeman onto the accident scene. I knelt by the woman on the gurney. She was small and frail. The EMTs had done a bit to clean her up, but she didn’t look good.
“Father, I think I’m bleeding to death inside.”
Lady, a lot of us are.
“Can I hold your hand?” I said. I turned to the cop next to me. “Get me some bread.”
“Please,” she moaned. I took her hand. “I’ve lived a good life, Father, but I’ve always envied those who had what I didn’t. Please forgive me.”
“God will forgive you,” I said. “Now, let’s say the apostles creed.”
“I believe in God, the Father Almighty, the Creator of heaven and earth…” She croaked it out slowly, giving every word a subtle reverence. When she was finished, I squeezed her hand and recited the Lord’s prayer.
The cop came back, triumphantly carrying a bag from the Italian restaurant across the street. I tore it open and put a piece of bread into the woman’s gnarled hand.
“This is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Happy are those who are called to his supper." I looked deep into the woman’s eyes and I felt like she was looking into me. Irrationally, I felt like this woman might know I was a fake and not care. Perhaps I also was being forgiven tonight.
The woman smiled. "Lord I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed," she murmured.
"The Body of Christ," I said, watching the woman chew the bread. She swallowed.
"Amen."
I squeezed her hand again. "May the Lord Jesus protect you and lead you to eternal life," I said. “Let us pray.”
She died in the middle of the prayer.
The walk home was the longest of my life. I thought over and over about the woman, about what a precious gift life was and about our duty to one another. I thought back over my life and I couldn’t believe the way I’d been acting. Carrie and I had a baby on the way! A new life! I couldn’t wait to get home and make love to Carrie. I knew the urges for other women would come back at some point, but well, if I could pass for a priest, I could pass for a faithful husband. Just because I had self-indulgent urges didn’t mean I had to act on them, after all. Hell, maybe it was a sex addiction. I was ready to talk to somebody, get myself cured.
Maybe I’d talk to a priest.
I took the steps up to the house two at a time and swung open the door, running inside to look for Carrie
Kendra’s bleeding body was lying on the living room floor. There was a gun lying a few feet away as if it had been discarded hastily. My coat and gloves were next to the gun.
Carrie walked in, the picture of innocence in a simple blue dress. She started to scream, “My God! My God! Brad! What have you done! I thought when I dropped you off after the party and drove around for awhile, you would have time to think...But... you've! Oh my God! I think you've KILLED her!” Her cries were so loud the neighbors could hear. “I have to call 911!” Carrie bolted into the kitchen and picked up the phone. I could hear her crying as she told the 911 operator that she had come home to find that her husband had just shot his mistress and now she feared for her life.
I looked around the room. Carrie was a careful woman. I assumed that she wore my coat and gloves when she shot Kendra, so that’s where the gun shot residue would be. Actually, in Kendra’s little plaid skirt, she looked like she had been dressed as a Catholic schoolgirl. I wondered if there would be a text message from my phone to Kendra’s sent right after I left the party offering Kendra a night of kinky Catholic fun. Probably. Carrie was smart. It was one of the things I loved about her.
Carrie walked back into the room.
“Carrie…honey. I’m sorry”
“You will be,” she said.
In the distance, there were sirens.Labels: mystery noir |
| posted by Chalicechick @ 9:24 AM |
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| Saturday, December 16, 2006 |
| Expectations |
It was after eleven, but my girlfriend Heather was still awake. She sat on the sofa, papers on her lap, her expression glum as the snow kept piling up outside the window. The TV news flickered in the background, jabbering on about some crime I'd already heard about at the station house. Sometimes she would reach up to the coffee table and grab up the pint of ice cream there. Gingerbread flavored, straight from the carton. I stood in the doorway, watching her.
Women. I never know what to do when Heather gets like this.
She shifted and turned the volume up on the TV. The nice-looking girl on the news looked like she was reporting from a party someplace expensive. She wore a red blazer in honor of the season.
"…A Christmas tragedy was averted here tonight," the reporter said into her microphone. "Viktor Gottberg, a partner at Gottberg and Stuebing, was rescued tonight by his secretary Kathy Prince." The camera showed an older man with blonde hair sitting on a stretcher outside an ambulance talking to some of the guys from the rescue squad. "Our sources are telling us that Mr. Gottberg has what was almost a fatal peanut allergy. Tonight at Gottberg and Stuebing's Christmas Party, he apparently ate a few bites of Thai chicken salad containing peanut oil and lapsed into shock. With a foot of snow on the ground, the ambulance was delayed. Miss Prince remembered that the previous attorney she had worked for at the firm was allergic to bee stings and he always kept an epinephrine pen in his office." The camera angle shifted to an exterior shot of a building that was on my beat. Hell, I'd been in Jerry's Coffee on the first floor just that day. "While the ambulances were fighting the snow, Kathy Prince was racing down three flights of stairs and back up with the pen so she didn't have to wait for the elevator. She administered the antidote and saved Gottberg's life."
The image on the screen shifted to a dishwater blonde woman with large glasses. Her cheeks were bright with embarrassment and maybe a little too much eggnog.
"Oh, I'd do anything for Mr. Gottberg," Kathy said. The camera cut away from her.
Heather wearily clicked off the TV. "I bet that Kathy woman's getting a really good review this year," Heather moaned. I hadn't even known that Heather knew I was standing there. She's sharp like that, my girl.
"Annual performance reviews?" I asked. "Is that what this funk is about?"
The two things Heather hates about working in a law firm at Christmas time: too much candy around and annual performance reviews.
"You know it, Jamey," Heather said wearily. "I hate these things." She had her self-evaluation paperwork spread out in front of her. I felt for her. God knows I'd been there. Some boss who thinks he understands how hard your life is comes in and rates your year of busting your ass on a scale of one to five, telling you numerically and scientifically why you don't deserve a promotion.
"Oh, Heather, everybody in the world hates these things. You know that."
She sighed. "It's all due in the morning and I don't know how to even start."
I reached up and stroked her hair. "You make too much of this stuff, Babe. My first year on the force, my partner told me his trick for those forms." She looked up at me, her attention suddenly fixed. Nobody can pay attention like a legal secretary. "Ok, how many different ways can they rate you in each category?"
"Four," Heather said. "Below expectations, meets expectations, exceeds expectations and outstanding."
"Ok, what are they asking about that you're best at?"
Heather thought for a minute. "I'd say my dealings with clients. They have a whole separate category for that. I'm really good with the clients. Mr. Bergstrom from Allied Computing says he always asks for me by name because he knows I know what I'm doing and can figure out a way to get his work done and in front of an attorney, even if it's at the last minute."
"OK, and what are they asking about that you're worst at?"
Heather giggled. "Attendance and punctuality." She reached up and stroked my cheek. We both knew I like to make her late in the mornings.
"Yeah, that's a good one. So give yourself an 'outstanding' in client relations and quote Mr. Bergstrom. Give yourself a 'meets expectations' in attendance and say your goal for the year is to do better. Then give yourself an "exceeds expectations" in everything else and come to bed. Because you ain't rewarded your boy in blue for his service to the community yet tonight."
Heather giggled. "Does talking about your best thing and your worst thing and saying you're just fine at everything else really work?"
"I've done it every year since I was a rookie and it ain't done me any harm."
Heather laughed for the first time all night. She scribbled some things on her paper, then followed me back to the bedroom, where we got an early start on making her late for work in the morning.
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It was a good night, but women are still women and she was still all pouty and worried for the rest of the week. She cooked dinner and we watched TV, but we did our romancing together at night seeing as how there was no way she was letting me make her late anymore when she'd just said she was gonna try and be better about that. Friday night, I was sitting in Jerry's Coffee on a break four hours into my shift when Heather called me up on my cell phone.
"James, you're a genius!" She said, her voice all giggly like a happy girl's. She only called me James when the news was really good, or really bad. "They agreed with me that I was outstanding in client relations and they thought I was honest for admitting I'm late a lot. I got a raise AND a bonus!"
Made me laugh. I just sat there on the phone with her and we laughed together, we was so relieved. My girl was going to be in a good mood again. She was going to her office Christmas party tonight and she was going to have a few drinks and take a cab home and then we'd do a little celebrating of our own.
My partner Mickey was looking at me like he couldn't quite stand to watch me. He's just a kid, and he's a little too proud of how tough he is to understand a guy feeling for a girl what I feel for Heather. Then his radio crackled and he picked it up to talk into it. When he put it down again, his expression was serious.
"Break's over, Leonardo diCaprio." He said. "We got a dead body right upstairs from us."
"What?"
We paid our check and headed up the elevator to the offices of Gottberg and Stuebing, rich bastard attorneys at law. When the door opened to the top floor, there was a gray-haired fat woman waiting for us. Between her and that Kathy woman from TV, I was not impressed. Was I schtupping the only nice-looking woman in the whole legal profession?
"Mr…err… the body is this way," the woman said. "I'm Evelyn Thorn, the office manager." She strode across the room, faster than I would've thought she could, and headed down a hall. Mickey and I had to hurry to keep up.
"Any idea what happened?" Mickey asked. I would never ask a witness a question so open-ended, but Mickey's a rookie and he doesn’t know his stuff.
"It looks like someone hit Mr. Gottberg over the head with a large paperweight he kept on his desk. His blood looks quite dry, so he might have been there for awhile. I hadn't seen him since yesterday morning." I nodded, impressed that she'd noticed the detail of the blood being dry. Of course, that CSI show has everybody looking for that stuff these days.
"Who else was around?" I asked. I shoved a notebook into Mickey's hands to remind him who did what on this team.
"No one," Miss Thorn said. "This entire floor got an email from Mr. Gottberg last night giving them today off. It's the Friday before Christmas, so it wouldn't be unusual for most bosses to do such a thing."
"You said most bosses wouldn't do it. Was Mr. Gottberg not like most bosses?" I asked. You gotta be quick on the uptake with secretaries and assistants. Those chicks always know more than they want to say.
Miss Thorn's steps slowed only slightly, but noticeably. "He was," she said, waiting for a moment to continue as if she was looking for the right word, "Exacting. A very hard worker himself. It would have been unusual for him to do such a thing, it normally wouldn't have even occurred to him."
I nodded, peeking over at Mickey to make sure he was getting all of this down.
"Where's Kathy?" I asked.
"Who?" Mickey asked me.
"Don't you watch the news?" I asked. "Mr. Gottberg here just got his life saved by his secretary Kathy. It was all over the papers."
"Oh," Mickey said. "this is that guy."
"Yes," Miss Thorn said, her voice impatient. "One of the top Mergers and Acquisitions lawyers in the city was indeed 'that guy.' And no, I haven't seen Kathy. I assumed she took the day off like everyone else who got that email." She pointed to an oak-paneled door. "The body is in there."
Gottberg was a very dead man in a very expensive suit. I wondered if he had been that pale in life. Maybe so. He lay on his back, blood caked in his blonde hair and beneath the wound on his head. Yep, somebody had killed him. I figured it had to be someone meeting with him or the guy wouldn't have gotten past Kathy. Just then I heard voices in the hall. It was our backup, some guys from homicide and the forensics guys and all that. My old buddy Lenny from the Academy was a detective now and he led the way.
"Yep, he's dead. Looks like it's been a day or so. An email went out to his employees giving them the day off, so it took awhile for the body to be discovered."
Lenny nodded. "Hey Jamey, listen," He said. "We can take it from here, but we're gonna need reports from you guys, too. Could you and Mickey wait outside with the witness and talk to her? We'll call you if we need you."
And like that, we were out the door. So much for old friends cutting you a piece of the action. I turned to Miss Thorn.
"Do you think the killer gave everybody the day off from Mr. Gottberg's computer?" I asked.
"I think it's highly likely," Miss Thorn said. We were now walking through Kathy's office. You could tell it was Kathy's because there were a bunch of plaques with her name on them on the walls. Employee of the month, Employee of the year at various firms around the city.
"Kathy's a hard worker." I said, stopping in front of an award that said Kathy got it for catching a mistake that would've cost her last firm a lot of money.
"One of the best employees we have. Her last attorney was sad to see her transferred, but Mr. Gottberg simply had to have the best."
"He's exacting," I said.
"Precisely."
"He have a hard time keeping staff around?"
Miss Thorn's eyes lowered. "I believe that's confidential information."
I sat down at Kathy's desk, being careful not to touch anything. Everything was lined up just so. You could have filmed a commercial for office supplies right at this desk. The usual papers were in neat piled in the trays on it. Legal forms, memos, even a pink employee performance review sheet where Kathy had given her assistant three outstandings and two exceeds expectations and recommended her for a bonus. Kathy's handwriting was neat and careful and her comments had sounded thoughtful.
She seemed a little off her nut to me, but she was probably a nice lady.
In Mr. Gottberg's office, the guys had started to take photographs of the crime scene. I looked up at Miss Thorne curiously. "Don't guys like Gottberg have corporate credit cards?"
Miss Thorne looked pleased to be able to help. "Yes, of course, I'll go get on the computer in my office to see if Mr. Gottberg's has been used."
"Why don't you escort the lady, Mickey," I said.
Having Miss Thorne escorted was standard procedure, though she didn't like it one bit. She gave me the bitchface but wearily let him follow her out of the room. Legal employees can fight you, but in the end they are used to following pointless orders. I peeked in to Gottberg's office, but Lenny shooed me out again. Fine. So I wandered around the room for a bit, then sat back down at Kathy's desk.
After awhile, curiosity got the better of me and I pulled some latex gloves out of my pocket so I could put them on and open the drawer. Kathy's desk had all the usual stuff, pens, a tampon, a little box of tissues. Probably Heather's desk looks about the same, except that Kathy was now keeping an epinephrine pen of her own in her desk in case Gottberg ate any more peanuts.
I love Heather to pieces, but I gotta admit that right then I wished she was half as good a girlfriend as Kathy was a secretary. Then I looked around at the office again. No pictures of family or art or nothing. Just plaques about how great a secretary Kathy was. I thought of my Heather and the beautiful babies we're going to have some day and I knew I wouldn't swap for a minute.
The guys from the morgue walked through with the stretcher. Gottberg was going back to the lab so some guys with degrees who make twice my salary could determine what killed the guy with the big head wound.
I poked around a bit and saw a red leather book in the back of a drawer. I pulled it out and had a look.
It was a journal of some type, with only five entries, each written in the same neat handwriting.
February 17th Gave Bergen forms to Viktor at 4:30 yesterday. He didn't look at them until today and said the date was wrong. Make multiple copies of all future forms with dates for several future days so I don't have to ask him for his signature twice.
May 5th Mispelled Mr. Radkowski's name. Put "Radkowski" into my computer's
dictionary so that spellcheck will catch any future errors.
July 30th Trusted Carla's numbers on the Lenmore acquisition. They were wrong. Will independently look up all future poison pill numbers for potential acquisitions.
I quit reading then. Kathy was officially starting to freak me out. Who the hell only makes five mistakes in a year and works so hard not to make them again?
Miss Thorn and Mickey came back through the door. Mickey had his arm around her. "It's gone!" Miss Thorne said. "She took the credit card, client money, everything!"
"What?"
"Kathy went through and cleaned out all of Mr. Gottberg's client accounts up to the cash withdrawal limits. Everything he could access without an extra signature got hit. Miss Thorn thinks the total was about three hundred thousand dollars. And that corporate credit card bought a plane ticket to Australia in Kathy's name. I called the airline from Miss Thorn's office. It looks like she took off early this morning, but missed her connection in Fiji."
"I'm guessing she's never going to reschedule?" Mickey asked. We both ignored him.
"Wow." I said. Sure, she was always a suspect, but I honestly wouldn't have thought a woman like Kathy would have had it in her.
"She must've been planning this for a long time," Mickey said.
"Not necessarily," I replied. "Someone who really knew how this place worked could have made this happen in a couple hours. I'd say if she had planned it carefully, you know, learned to fake a few more signatures, she woulda got a lot more money out of it. I bet some of those accounts had millions of dollars in them."
Mickey shrugged.
Miss Thorn sat down and started to cry. Hard to swallow, your best employee being a murderer. Mickey and I went into Gottberg's office with the news.
The guys had just put Gottberg on a stretcher, but everyone stopped what they were doing when I told them what Miss Thorn had told me.
Lenny was the first to speak. "That doesn't make any sense!" He said. "If her plan was to steal from the firm and run off, why didn't she just let the bastard die at the party? She could've taken everything that night in the confusion and if she'd have gotten caught, she would've been a thief, not a murderer."
Lenny had a point. Why hadn't she taken the easy route to stealing the money if that was all she wanted? And if the money was just an afterthought, why the hell had she gone and killed her boss?
And then I knew.
Still wearing my gloves, I calmly walked over to the trashcan and fished out the only pink piece of paper there.
And there it was, right in front of my face.
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Annual Employee Performance Review
Name: Kathy Prince
Title: Senior Legal Secretary
Date: December 15
Supervisor: Viktor Gottberg
Period Reviewed: January 1 to December 31
Job Knowledge: Meets Expectations
Work Quality: Meets Expectations
Client Relations: Meets Expectations
Attendance: Meets Expectations
Dependability: Meets Expectations
Overall: Meets Expectations
_______________________________________________Labels: mystery noir |
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Name: Chalicechick
Home: Virginia, United States
About Me: My turn-ons include long walks on the beach and guys who like game theory.
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