Chesapeake Crimes: This Job Is Murder!

MEAN GIRLS, by Donna Andrews

“Where the hell were you Friday?” Tiffany shrieked as I walked through the office door.

I ignored her and continued to my desk.

“Now, now,” Jessica said. “Let’s try to behave like adults. Kate,” she said, turning to me, “we’re very disappointed in you. You were supposed to open the office and cover the phones on the day after Thanksgiving. Hasn’t Dr. Grace already spoken to you about the importance of keeping your commitments?”

For Jessica, apparently, behaving like an adult meant adopting the kind of tone you’d use when talking to a four-year-old child. I set down my purse and took off my coat.

“There’s just no use talking to some people,” Amanda said, while staring at the top of the window behind me. In the eight months I’d been working for Edith Grace Personnel Services, she had yet to look me in the face or address me directly.

All three of the mean girls, as I called them, were lined up in front of my desk. Normally, they waited until afternoon to pick on me. Maybe they’d missed doing it over the four-day Thanksgiving weekend.

Maybe this would be the day they’d push too far and propel me into quitting this thankless, dead-end job.

Or maybe I wouldn’t have to quit. Business was slow, and it was an open secret that Dr. Grace would probably be downsizing her staff before too long. A sane boss would fire one of the mean girls, who were overpaid, underworked, and largely interchangeable. Tiffany and Amanda were slightly ruder, but Jessica, though arguably incompetent, was better at sucking up to the boss. And they were all expert at blaming anything that went wrong on me. So the odds were that Dr. Grace would lay me off instead. As I stared at the frowning faces in front of me, I almost hoped she would.

“Good morning to you, too.” I tried to keep my tone even and my face cheerful. “What seems to be the problem?”

They all three blinked and gawked at me for a few seconds.

“You didn’t come to the office on Friday,” Tiffany said.

“Yes, I did,” I said. “Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get in the office because the key I was given didn’t open the outer door.”

I reached into my purse and pulled out the key in question, still attached to a small tag marked “Building Entrance” in our boss’s spidery handwriting.

“That’s impossible,” Jessica said. “That’s the key we’ve always used.”

“Oh, dear,” Tiffany said. “Didn’t we change the lock after the last receptionist left?”

Jessica’s mouth formed a little O. Amanda sighed loudly. Tiffany actually growled. I had to suppress a giggle at this rare break in the mean girls’ solidarity.

Jessica recovered her composure and turned to me, a frown marring her perfectly made-up face.

“Still, you could have called someone,” she said.

“I called Dr. Grace and left a message,” I said. “I knew the three of you were planning to be out of town. So after waiting outside the building in the freezing cold for an hour, I went home. I kept my cell phone with me for the rest of the day, but Dr. Grace never returned my call.”

I refrained from adding, “So there!” They could probably hear it in my voice.

“Let’s just see about that, shall we?” Jessica said. “I can’t imagine that Dr. Grace would not have done something if she actually got such a message.”

She set off briskly down the hall toward Dr. Grace’s office.

“Someone slipped a nasty note under the front door,” Tiffany said. “And who knows how many other clients went away upset.” She was waving a slip of paper-the nasty note, I assumed. But her eyes were on my in-box. In fact, she and Amanda were both staring at the foot-high stack of work the three of them had dumped on my desk Wednesday, when they heard Dr. Grace order me to come in on Friday. I wondered how many of the projects in that stack they were supposed to have finished by this morning?

“Unbelievable,” Amanda said to the ceiling. “Come on, Tiff.”

They followed Jessica down the hall. I sat down and pressed a key to wake up my computer.

“Dr. Grace?” I heard Jessica saying, as she knocked on our boss’s door. “Can we talk to you for a moment?”

Dr. Grace would probably look puzzled and disappointed, and claim that she didn’t recall getting my message, and ask if I was quite sure I had dialed her number correctly. At least that’s what she’d done a month ago when I’d called her to say I’d had a flat tire on my way to work. So this time I’d followed up my voice mail message with an email from my home computer.

“Dr. Grace? Are you in there?”

Of course she was in there. It was only a few minutes until the regular nine a.m. Monday staff meeting. Any second now she would emerge, ready to pontificate to her minions and receive their daily tributes of candy, baked goods, lattes, and flowers.

I scanned my own email. Yes, there were several complaints from people who’d tried to reach us Friday. And the copy of my Friday message. Any reasonable person would understand what had happened.

And if they were unreasonable and fired me, maybe that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. Maybe-

“Oh, my God!” Jessica exclaimed from the other end of the hallway.

Someone began shrieking, but I couldn’t tell who it was until Tiffany burst into the reception area, still shrieking.

“What now?” I muttered.

Jessica dashed in behind Tiffany.

“Now, Tiffany,” she was saying. “We must be brave.”

Tiffany threw herself onto the couch in the waiting area and added sobs to her shrieks.

“Go help Amanda!” Jessica snapped at me.

I got up and headed down the hall. I found Amanda crumpled in the doorway of Dr. Grace’s office. Her eyelids were fluttering, so either she’d fainted and was coming around or she was faking it and vexed that no one had come to her aid.

I stepped over Amanda and looked to see what the problem was.

“Damn,” I said.

Dr. Grace was slumped over her desk, arms outstretched as if she had attempted a swan dive onto its polished mahogany surface. An uncomfortable-looking position, but one that gave me a good view of the knife stuck in her back.

I pulled out my cell phone and punched 911.

The first uniformed officer showed up in less than five minutes. He was followed by more uniformed officers. Then a couple of EMTs who seemed a bit annoyed at being called out for someone so clearly past saving. A pair of detectives flashing gold badges. And then a small swarm of crime-scene technicians.

The mean girls and I got to watch all this from the glass-walled conference room off the reception area, under the watchful eyes of a uniformed officer who made sure we didn’t talk to one another. The mean girls sniffled and looked shell-shocked. I had to remind myself that humming “Ding, Dong, the Witch Is Dead!” would probably not be a wise move.

The room was already set up for the usual Monday morning staff meeting. The mean girls all stayed at the far end of the room, away from the chair where, if she hadn’t been murdered, Dr. Grace would have been presiding. I wasn’t ever invited to their meetings, of course, but I would watch the whole show through the glass walls.

I wouldn’t have hesitated to sit in Dr. Grace’s chair-in fact, I’d have enjoyed annoying them by doing so-but I could get a better view of what the police were doing from the middle of the table.

After a great long while, one of the detectives stepped into the room.

“Which one of you is Ms. Malone?” he asked.

“Me.” I raised my hand as if in class. The mean girls all flashed triumphant, malicious little smiles at each other.

“You’re the one who called 911?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Great,” he said. “I’d like to start with you.”

Three pairs of hostile eyes followed me out.

The detective led me into the one empty office and sat behind the desk. As I sat down, I glanced through the glass walls of the office. In the conference room, the mean girls were sitting in a cluster, watching me. My stomach tightened. After all, everyone knew how I felt about Dr. Grace. What if the whole key fiasco hadn’t been an accident-what if it was part of some convoluted plot by one of the mean girls to knock off Dr. Grace and frame me?

Of course, that would take brains. Not something the mean girls had a surplus of.

I’d expected the detective to demand where I was on the day after Thanksgiving, but he started out in a more casual tone.

“So,” he began. “Just what is Edith Grace Personnel Services?”

“Sort of a specialized human resources company,” I said. “If a company’s downsizing and doesn’t want their own HR people to go through the trauma of breaking the news to the victims, they hire EGPS.”

“So you fire people for a living?”

“Me? No, I just type and answer the phone and mind the reception desk. Dr. Grace and the mean girls do the firing.”

“Mean girls?” He raised one eyebrow.

Oops. “That’s what I call them. Jessica, Amanda, and Tiffany. Mean girls. Because that’s how they behave.”

The corner of his mouth twitched slightly, as if he were trying not to smile. Then he gave in and chuckled.

“My sister used to come home from high school complaining about what the mean girls had done to her that day,” he said. “Been a while since I’ve heard the phrase.”

“Maybe some of those high-school mean girls grow up to be pleasant women,” I said. “Not these three. They’re perfect for the job.”

“For firing people?”

I nodded.

“Don’t they also help people find new jobs?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “They do outplacement services. Classes on resume writing and how to find job leads and present yourself well in an interview. Actually getting a job’s your own problem.”

“You sound a little cynical about what your company does.”

“Not my company,” I said. “I’m just working here until I find a job in my field.”

“And that is?”

“I was a reporter.” I wondered if he knew how moribund the newspaper industry was, how many dozens of applicants there were for every job that came open, and how very likely I was to spend the next couple of decades working thankless jobs like this one.

But not with Dr. Grace. Or the mean girls. The thought cheered me up.

“You don’t look as upset as the others,” he said.

“I’ve only been here eight months,” I said. “It hasn’t been a ball of fun.”

“You disliked Dr. Grace, then?”

“Yes.” I didn’t see any reason to lie. “Not enough to kill her, of course. And I suppose at the very least I should be upset that I’ll be losing my job.”

“You don’t think they’ll keep you on?” he asked. “Surely without Dr. Grace the company will need all the help they can get.”

“I doubt if the company will survive without Dr. Grace,” I said. “She’s the one who has the credentials and the contacts. Had, that is. All they know how to do is fire people.”

“Tough job,” he said.

Tougher on the ones getting fired if you asked me. Should I tell him how much the mean girls seemed to enjoy it? How they put on their sad, sympathetic faces as easily as pulling on a sweater, and then at the end of the day gathered in the coffee room to make fun of their poor clients.

“I wouldn’t want to do it,” I said aloud.

“So if you or any of her employees murdered Dr. Grace, you’d be killing the goose that lays the golden eggs,” he said.

“Only copper eggs in my case. But yes.”

“You must have a lot of disgruntled people coming through this office.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But wouldn’t most of them be more disgruntled at the companies who fired them?” I was happier when I thought he was suspicious of the mean girls. Was it my long-dormant reporter’s instincts that told me one of the mean girls had to have done it? Or was it just that I hoped he’d find one of them guilty?

“Still,” he went on. “Maybe one of those disgruntled unemployed people focused his anger at Dr. Grace. Can you remember anyone in particular?”

So for the next hour, he picked my brains about disgruntled clients. Were any of them more disgruntled than usual? Had we received threats? Did Dr. Grace have enemies? Did all the mean girls like her? And what had I been doing over the last four days? I was relieved that I did have an alibi of sorts for the time I was at the office on Friday, even if it was only the homeless man who slept on the steps of the church across the street. Good thing I’d turned down his offer to get me into the building by breaking a window.

“So who do you think did it?” the detective finally asked.

“One of the mean girls,” I said. “No idea which.”

He nodded. His face didn’t give away much. I had no idea if he thought I was a reliable witness or a suspiciously disgruntled employee.

Then one of the uniformed officers escorted me back to the conference room, and I waited while the detective interviewed the mean girls, one by one. For a while I watched the activity outside as police officers and technicians came and went. But eventually that died down, so I pulled a paperback out of my purse and read, ignoring the glares of the others.

Finally Amanda came back into the room, still leaking tears, followed by the detective.

“I want to thank all of you for your time,” he said.

He looked irritated. I would, too, after spending a couple of hours with my co-workers.

Or maybe he was just hungry. My stomach picked that moment to growl loudly. The mean girls all glared at me, as if I’d done it deliberately to mar this solemn occasion.

“This is still an open investigation,” the detective went on. “And I will probably have more questions for all of you.”

But it looked as if he was letting us go for now. Good. I wished he’d hurry. As the detective handed out his cards and asked us to stay in the area, I found myself eyeing the two muffins still sitting on a small china plate at what would have been Dr. Grace’s place at the table. Part of the usual weekly tribute. The muffins were low-fat, sugar-free bran muffins-I’d once tasted a leftover one and found it about as appetizing as sawdust. But as hungry as I was, even the muffins were starting to look good.

Wait a minute. The muffins were there as usual. Beside them, also as usual, was the vase of fresh flowers that would grace the table during their meeting and Dr. Grace’s desk for the rest of the day. But something was missing.

“Where’s the latte?” I said aloud.

Everyone turned to look at me.

“What’s that?” the detective asked.

“Where’s Dr. Grace’s latte?” I asked. “Every morning Tiffany brings her a bran muffin from the organic bakery down the street. Amanda brings her fresh flowers from the stand by the Metro stop. Sometimes candy, if she can get to the Godiva store, but usually flowers. And Jessica always stops at Starbucks to bring her a low-fat, sugar-free latte with skim milk. Where’s the latte?”

Jessica’s face was fun to watch as it changed from annoyance to surprise to utter horror as she thought through what I’d just said. And like the rest of us, she was staring at the tall brown Starbucks paper cup in front of her own place at the table.

“Dr. Grace didn’t…I mean, knew she probably wouldn’t…”

Then she shut up. She didn’t actually say “I want my attorney,” but I had the feeling those words were in her future.

She looked at Tiffany and Amanda, as if pleading for support.

They both hitched their chairs away from her. Tiffany hitched hers so far she was sitting next to me.

“We knew Dr. Grace was thinking of letting someone go,” Tiffany told the detective. “But we thought it was-I mean, I suppose we should have realized it would have to be Jessica.”

“Some people truly are impossible, aren’t they?” Amanda said. She glanced at me briefly with a faint smile before turning to stare at a spot a foot above Jessica’s head.

Maybe in high school I’d have been tempted. But even in high school, I don’t think I’d have fallen for their overtures. I ignored them, and stood up.

“Can I still leave?” I asked the detective. “And is it okay for me to clean out my desk right now? I’m resigning, effective immediately, and I’d rather not have to come back to this snake pit.”

“Be my guest,” he said.

Tiffany and Amanda both rose, uttering feeble bleats of protest.

“Ladies,” the detective said. “I have a few more questions for all three of you.”

They sat back down again, looking forlorn. The detective led Jessica back to the office he’d been using as his interview room.

Packing wouldn’t take long. By the time he finished with the mean girls and hauled Jessica down to the station, I’d be long gone. Maybe I’d stop on the way home and buy some champagne to celebrate my freedom.

Better yet, maybe I’d stop at Starbucks and toast my victory with a latte.

Donna Andrews was born in Yorktown, Virginia, and now lives in Reston, Virginia. The Real Macaw, (July 2011, Minotaur), is the latest book in her Agatha- and Anthony-winning Meg Langslow series, and Some Like It Hawk will be released in July 2012. She has also written four books in the Turing Hopper series from Berkley Prime Crime. For more information: http://donnaandrews.com.