Billie Sullivan called from the storage closet in her office, “Gimme two more seconds.”
Kate caught glimpses of stringy red hair and a pink man-tailored blouse, its tail hanging out over a green skirt so wrinkled the pattern was indiscernible. Sitting down in the single chair in front of Billie Sullivan’s desk, she watched, fascinated, as from the closet into a huge cardboard box were flung nylon stockings, tennis shoes, a sweater, two candles, four cans of Budweiser, a pillow, a clock radio, a set of wind chimes, and a sack of pistachio nuts.
Billie Sullivan emerged from the closet smacking her hands together in satisfaction, and moved to her desk in liquid loping strides. She folded herself into her chair. “So grill me, lady copper.”
She was the thinnest woman Kate had ever seen, the bones of the arms she propped on the desk protruding whitely through the skin. She looked at Kate with raised reddish eyebrows, neither green eye precisely focused. Kate asked, “How come you’re packing?”
“I figure that dink manager’s gonna toss my ass any second.”
“Why would he want to do that?” Kate’s voice was expressionless.
“I do even less around here than Fred Grayson. The world champion brown-noser and dumb shit.”
A woman with nothing whatever to lose, Kate saw. “Hasn’t he been sales manager here a number of years?” She stuffed her hands into the pockets of her undersize jacket and arranged herself comfortably in the chair. For now she would take no notes.
“So what if he has? He’s an asshole. And dumb? I bet his wife has to write directions on her body.”
Kate hastily removed a hand from a pocket to rub it across her grin. “Miss Sullivan—”
“I won’t talk to anyone that calls me that.” Her tone was adamant. “I’m Billie.”
“Billie,” she conceded. “Who would want to kill your boss?”
She gritted her teeth against the screeching laugh. “You want I should list them in order?”
“It would be helpful,” Kate said drily.
Several of the fingernails Billie Sullivan tapped on the desk were broken, the sharp edges unfiled. “Hard to say,” she said finally. “Harley Burton’s number one easy if he knew how much shit the boss actually did him. But I’d have to say…Well, the boss all but pulled out his cock and pissed all over Gail Freeman.”
Billie Sullivan picked up a desk dictionary and hurled it into the cardboard box. Kate waited.
“The boss did everything we could think of. Believe me, together we could be pretty cute. Only a matter of time before we figured a way to airmail his ass.”
“Why do you dislike Mr. Freeman?”
“Not because he’s colored, if that’s your drift,” she said immediately. “The boss and dumbshit Grayson, they hate blacks—but I don’t. Colored, female—I figure that’s a tradeoff.” She gyrated on her chair, pulling bony fingers through her hair. “Gail Freeman bullshits everybody that works for him. Claims we all do something valuable, for chrissakes.” Her tone was withering. “A boss gave me that snowjob just once. Before I found out what a stinking cesspool business really is. Men,” she sneered, “it’s their fucking world, all their fun and games. Men have it all and they aren’t about to give it up, I don’t care what kind of stupid movements come along to try and stop them. All the bastards ever want to do is kill each other and fuck every woman they see.”
Kate cleared her throat and said mildly, “Don’t you think Mr. Freeman is at least sincere?”
“Sincere? Sincere?” Her out-of-focus eyes glared at Kate. “What does sincere have to do with anything? Lady copper, you wear a gun?”
Warily, Kate nodded. “Regulations.”
“I wish to Christ I could. Wear it right out on my hip like a cowboy. Right where everybody can see it. Eat or get eaten, that’s all there is, nothing more. Five minutes after you’re dead nobody knows your name.”
Cynical as any cop, Kate thought, watching her.
“Gail Freeman took away the boss’s fun, lots of his games. Made the boss have to think. Every change he made, the boss had to call in brown-noser Grayson and learn all about it so nobody could get a leg up on him. He hated Gail Freeman.”
“Sounds like your boss had more motive to murder Gail Freeman than the other way around,” Kate commented as she took out her notebook and consulted her brief profile of Billie Sullivan. “Billie, you’ve worked here three years, two months. Two years longer than any other job. Why did you get along so well with Fergus Parker?”
“Tell you a story. Few months back, Pete Webber wised up and quit. Gave the boss a gift, a shovel with a red ribbon on it. Said the boss should dig up his own mother and screw her too, she was the only person he hadn’t done it to, what difference did it make she was dead?”
“You’re making that up,” Kate said.
Screeching with laughter, Billie Sullivan shook a cigarette from a pack of Benson & Hedges. “Yeah, but it’s a neat story, right? I knew exactly what I had to deal with in the boss. Other bosses I had, they were assholes too but they’d do nice things once in a while, help somebody, give money to charity, that kind of shit. Not the boss.” She exhaled smoke in a thin jet, placed a blade sharp elbow on the desk, and cupped her chin. “I could depend on the boss to be a total stinko.”
Kate smiled. “It’s nice to have consistency in this world. Who’s number two on your list?”
“The brown-noser,” she said promptly. “You know where you stand with him, too. Absolutely nowhere. If he was going down for the last time, had to decide between a rope and life preserver, he’d drown.”
Kate smiled again. “How could a successful manager like Fred Grayson be indecisive?”
“Easy. Real easy.” Billie Sullivan flicked ash in the direction of a battered metal ashtray. “He didn’t used to be indecisive. The boss and me, we punched him into the perfect company man. Anybody can do it—even to you, lady copper. You make a decision and your boss stands up in front of other people and says you’re wrong and stupid besides.”
Kate said evenly, “That would happen exactly once.”
Billie Sullivan surveyed her with a glance. “Yeah, maybe not you. Maybe not some other people. But the brown-noser caved right in. A man’s got to stand up at least once and put his balls on the table, right? That asshole never had the guts to stand up once.” Her voice was vibrant with contempt. “In return for giving up his balls and licking the boss’s ass, the boss kept him around and made all his decisions for him.”
“You seem to have a special distaste for Mr. Grayson.”
“Wouldn’t you? How can anybody give his balls away? God damn it, if I was a man I’d run this fucking world.”
Indeed you might, Kate thought. “Why would Fred Grayson want to kill the man who was taking care of him?”
“Oh come on.” Billie Sullivan bared her teeth in a humorless grin. “You’re a woman. Don’t shit me. Don’t let on you don’t understand all about getting fucked and being taken care of. How it feels, what you think about it.”
Kate cleared her throat. “Who’s next?”
“Gretchen, I suppose. Only because she didn’t know how well off she was.”
“You didn’t even try to at least protect her?” With calculation she added, “From…that?”
“Then you heard, I guess.” Kate did not respond. Billie Sullivan again gyrated on her chair. “Why? Why should I?”
Kate said bluntly, “Because she’s a woman.”
“And we have enough trouble without doing it to each other, right? He never wanted to fuck any woman here except her. Never made a move on anybody except her. He heard she liked girls and that turned him on. Explain that one to me.”
Kate shrugged. “I can’t even begin to understand the way people are about sex.”
“He fucked her maybe once every couple weeks, she got a sales manager job out of it. And he didn’t do anything else to her, I saw to that, made sure he never saw anything in her but some harmless fluff to fuck once in a while.”
“Have you ever been raped?”
“I’ve been married. Does that count?”
Kate ignored the retort. “I’ve seen raped women. I would think that another woman—”
“Hey lady copper, there’s rape and there’s sex you don’t want. You don’t believe there’s a difference? Ever been married? No? Ask married women. Like me, I was, twice. I liked sex but I didn’t want the fucking, getting that done to me. All the women I know don’t want it either, at least some of the time. The bastards all say they don’t know what women want today. We don’t want anything more than we ever did. All we are is honest now about the shit they do in bed.”
“Not all women feel that way.”
“Show me one that doesn’t, she’s had a lobotomy. Look, lady copper. The boss fucked everybody. If he didn’t do it to Gretchen that way he’d have figured out some other way. He fucked everybody some way. Understand?” Her voice was exasperated, as if she were explaining a simple concept to a dull child. “He hadto do it. It was him, see that? He had to have his brand on everybody’s ass.” She flicked ash again, pulled at her hair. “I did what I could for her. It was the best I could do. It was all I could do.”
“Did you never want to change things?”
“Change things,” Billie Sullivan repeated.
Kate remained silent; she watched the intake of smoke as Billie Sullivan drew from her cigarette, and the eyes that stared at her in unblinking, unfocused scorn.
“All the Fergus Parkers out there and you want me to change things. What kind of cop are you? This your first case? They had you walking old ladies across the street, right?”
Kate smiled at her. “Who’s next?” Surely it would be Harley Burton.
“Maybe…Guy Adams. Not that he could’ve done it,” she added. “I’m talking pure motive here, pure and simple. Guy Adams is a type.”
The word had been spoken venomously. “What kind of type?” Kate asked, suspecting that Billie Sullivan’s view of Guy Adams was not dissimilar to her own.
“Pretty clothes, pretty face, his mama sent him to one of those Eastern charm schools—”
Kate resisted the impulse to nod, to add that his type also never got mugged or violated, never even conceived of such outrages happening to them. They never even got traffic tickets …
“Now he looks for women to keep on taking care of him,” Billie Sullivan sneered. “Just like my own Daddy does to my Mama. The Ashley Wilkes type, you follow me?”
Kate said, grinning, “The character from Gone With the Wind that Scarlett thought was so noble.”
“The wimp from Gone With the Wind,” she corrected her. “A dear old Daddy type. You’d never think I had a Daddy with class, would you? Graduate of Yale? With a daughter who stomped out of Vassar her first year.” Screeching with laughter, heedless of the skirt that hiked well above her large-jointed knees, she raised broomstick thin legs encased in red plaid knee socks, and propped transparent plastic sandals on the desk.
“Daddy hasn’t talked to me since the day I explained to him what he was doing to Mama and what a world-class asshole he really was. I got more balls than my Daddy and Guy Adams combined. You know how Guy Adams thinks? He thinks he can make phone calls to Philadelphia knocking the boss and get away with it, not have it get back. Guy Adams thinks people like the boss aren’t dangerous at all, he thinks they just have bad manners. He doesn’t have a clue.”
“Do you think any of the people here except you really had a clue about that?”
She contemplated Kate. “Good question, lady copper. I’d say…maybe. But I’d guess they never compared notes, put it all together. Too embarrassed to admit what they all put up with, all the shit they ate.”
“Harley Burton,” Kate prodded. “You mentioned before he had the most motive of anybody—if he knew. Knew what?”
“What about me?” she parried. “Aren’t you curious why the boss kept me around? Why he liked me?”
“I expect because you understood each other,” Kate said drily. “Was there another reason?”
“My source. That’s why he really needed me. Milly in Philly. Jonathon Wagner’s secretary. He’s the president, you know. Me and Milly in Philly are like that.” She held up two intertwined fingers. “She was the one that told me about each and every phone call Guy Adams made. Months ago Milly in Philly told me they were reorganizing, the boss was top choice for a big promotion, his region looked so good. That was because the boss’s managers were all busting their asses—but anyway, the boss knew six months ago something was breaking and he could plan.”
“I see.” Kate turned to a fresh page in her notebook.
“No you don’t, but you will. Everybody was afraid of the boss except the one guy around here who handles himself. Harley Burton. And he was worse than trouble, he was competition. One more promotion and he’d of been gone, somewhere else in the country, same as the boss in position and title. Who knows from there? Someday the boss might even have to work for a guy who was once under him. Can you imagine that? Then Tampa opened, Harley Burton wanted Pete Webber to get the job, the boss saw his chance. He turned Webber down. Transferred him to new accounts, figuring he might get pissed enough to quit. Which he did and the boss blamed Harley Burton, demoted him out of that corner office, moved brown-noser Grayson in. And so he had all the talent in his region right under his thumb. Neat?”
“Neat,” Kate agreed, making rapid notes.
“There’s more. He figured he could walk on Harley Burton—his best man—because Harley Burton wouldn’t quit with only a few months left before he had fifteen years in, got vested in the pension plan. Then the boss could move him back into the corner office after the promotion, could afford to then, he’d be two organization levels higher, could always control him. And Harley Burton would see that he had a career again and wouldn’t quit. See how cute the boss was?”
“Indeed,” Kate said. “What did he plan to do about Fred Grayson?”
She shrugged. “Kick him back down where he came from. Or palm him off on some unsuspecting fool in another region.” She grimaced. “The brown-noser came out of this even better than he knows…”
“Did Fergus Parker have plans for anyone else?”
She made a slitting motion across her throat. “That, for Gail Freeman and Guy Adams. If it was the last thing he ever did.”
Kate remained silent, diagramming the machinations of Fergus Parker and recording several direct quotes from Billie Sullivan. “Billie,” she said, “you didn’t place Duane Fletcher anywhere on your list.”
“Poor Duane,” she said mockingly, “that’s what everybody always calls him. Poor Duane. Yeah, the boss kicked his ass all over the office. You know, we sell office furniture here. You’d think Duane was peddling the cure for cancer. Let me tell you about poor Duane. At my house I got cats. Strays come around, two decided to stay. I’d rather have cats than a man anytime, but I’m no Doris Day, I don’t even like animals much. Wouldn’t have a dog if you paid me. But cats are different. Cats stay because they want to be there. Dogs—you kick a dog and it licks your foot. That’s Duane Fletcher.”
“You’re telling me he didn’t have a motive for killing Fergus Parker?”
“Oh shit yes he had a motive,” she said impatiently, glaring at Kate, then discarding her butt into the ashtray without bothering to extinguish it. “Don’t you catch my drift at all? Not much wonder you cops never catch anybody. What the boss did to Duane, anybody’d want to kill him fifteen times over. But the dog you kick, does it ever kill you? Shit no. Whoever knocked off the boss—you better look for a cat, not a dog like Duane Fletcher.”
“I see. So you’re telling me Gretchen Phillips and Harley Burton and Gail Freeman are capable.”
“Gretchen and Gail Freeman are,” she said after a moment. “Some people can take a lot, but only so much …”
“But not Harley Burton?” She suspected that Billie Sullivan felt an admiration for Harley Burton she would not admit.
“He’s capable. More capable than anybody. But I see him walking out the door, saying fuck the pension. I can see him punching the boss’s lights out. I don’t see—well, Harley Burton wouldn’t use a knife, that’s all.”
“You’ve been very helpful,” Kate said.
“Snitching is what I do best,” Billie Sullivan said.
“What’ll you do after you leave Modern Office?”
“Go back to work for a while and behave.” With a sigh, she removed her feet from the desk. “The typing and dictation shit again. It’s been a three-year vacation with the boss. But don’t waste any sympathy on me. Milly in Philly laid the word on me a little while ago about the boss’s replacement. Would you believe Fred Grayson?”
Kate murmured, “That seems somehow…appropriate.”
Again Billie Sullivan bared her teeth in a grin. “I don’t figure it’ll be long before I find another Fergus Parker and I’ll be on vacation again. In the meantime, I have a special farewell in mind when the dink manager comes down here to toss my ass. But don’t say anything, okay? Don’t spoil my fun.”
“There’s no reason to say anything. My business is police business.”
Kate got up and gave her one of her cards. With a disdainful flip of her wrist, Billie Sullivan tossed it into her cardboard box.