Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 141, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 858 & 859, March/April 2013

Murder at an Ad Agency by Meredith Anthony

Meredith Anthony’s most recent novel, Ladykiller (Oceanview 2010), was co-written with her husband, Bloomberg News editor Lawrence Light. She tells us she has just finished a new novel, entitled Hellmouth, and she also had a short story, “Fishtown Odyssey,” featured in Akashic Books’ Philadelphia Noir. Her last appearance in EQMM was in 2008. She returns with a story set in the world of New York advertising — a world she knows well after a career as an ad agency copywriter.

The definition of redundant: The boss keeps snakes in his office.

Jenny sighed. It was midnight and the stale air-conditioned air was scented with Chinese food, bad coffee, and the faint, sweet, unmistakable stink of corruption.

She wrinkled her nose, as much as her recent Botox would allow, and tried to breathe shallowly. Gordo’s snake had sicked up a mouse and although he’d cleaned out the terrarium quite thoroughly, the odor hung like a pall, all over the office floor. Not just dead mouse, Jenny thought bitterly, but vomited dead mouse.

If Gordo weren’t her boss, she would tweet this because no one would believe it. It would make a funny tweet, but Gordo would fire her in the proverbial heartbeat, as if he had a heart, the bastard. He was just looking for an excuse. He had been staying after hours whenever she worked late, skulking around, watching, sneaking up behind her. Once, she had come back from the ladies’ room and found him in her cube, bent over. He straightened up and asked her tersely what she was working on, but she knew he’d been looking in her recycling, probably searching for damning evidence, something to fire her for.

VP account execs at Gordo’s level never had to work late. It was one of the perks. Clearly, Gordo was up to something. He had it in for his copy team. He had fired her boss two weeks ago, a slot he still hadn’t filled. Jenny knew the score. He wanted to make a clean sweep. She knew she was next.

She shook her head to clear it and went back to reading the “fair balance” at the bottom of the page. The font was only one size smaller than the text, per FDA requirements, but it seemed like fine print to her. She had read this particular paragraph on ten previous rounds and it was getting hard to concentrate.

At night, the New York headquarters of any big ad agency is surprisingly busy. The executive offices with windows are mostly darkened, but the cubicles that make up the inner landscape of the floor show pockets of light and activity. At least one team is always working. A deadline looms and the account executive, the writer, the art director, the editor, the project manager, and assorted other personnel are working hectically to get the job done.

At Nathan and Massey, one of the world’s premier pharmaceutical advertisers, the oncology team, as usual, was working late. ASCO was coming up and the enormous panels used to decorate their client’s massive convention booth had been printed in plenty of time. But the FDA, in its wisdom, had imposed a last-minute label change on their drug, making the pregnancy warning even more stringent. As if anyone with this particular cancer would risk pregnancy. Or even have the energy to get pregnant, Jenny thought.

She tried reading the paragraph again. Jenny didn’t know whether it was the late hour, the exhaustion, or the faint stench of death, but she felt sick and unable to concentrate.

Add the fact that Gordo himself was still here, lurking, spying. She imagined him coming up behind her. Everyone hated him. Gordo, with his snakes and his venomous personality. Jenny would love to just quit, but she couldn’t afford to lose this job. She was older than she looked and she wasn’t sure she could get work at another agency. It was a young person’s industry, unless you were in the upper echelons. Jenny wasn’t. She couldn’t afford to be fired. Again.

She remembered her last agency, working late into the night to finish a pre-launch product brief for a new migraine remedy, the name the usual jumble of random letters. She had finished after midnight. The account team had already left. She resented being given the odious assignment. Everyone knew the product would never launch. It had taken her hours to review the research but it took no more than forty minutes to actually write the brief. Her fingers flew over the keys as she blathered on about how one of these would cure the condition, the auras, the light-sensitivity, the nausea, the intense pain. “Prescribe two of these and the patient will wake up smiling,” she typed at the end. Then, the night editor, the bastard, told her it would be more than an hour before he could even look at her piece. No freaking way, she thought. She sent it to the client unedited with a terse e-mail note. She didn’t even bother to read it through.

Unfortunately, her spell-check was set to auto and the product name had self-corrected to a perfectly innocent noun which unfortunately was also a slang term for a body part. While she was being fired the next morning, she could hear the gales of laughter as the story swept the office. “The patient will wake up smiling,” someone bleated.

Jenny took the bullet even though it wasn’t remotely her fault. Jenny hated her colleagues who had laughed at her. She hated the boss who fired her. And she hated her new boss, Gordo, and the snakes he actually did keep in his office, imagining them, for a moment, slithering around loose.

She started humming to herself, “Isn’t it redundant?” to the tune of “Isn’t It Romantic?” She was searching for a good second line when something touched her shoulder and she bolted up out of her seat, head-butting Traffic, who reeled back, staggered, and grabbed the spinning office chair to steady herself.

“No worries, Jenny.” Traffic rubbed her chin where Jenny’s head had caught it. Jenny leaned her hip on her cube desk, her hand over her thumping heart.

“You scared the hell out of me.”

“No worries. Just checking to see where we are with the replacement panels.” Traffic started every sentence with “No worries” to defuse the fact that she was there to whip someone into working faster. Her apologetic air did nothing to disguise the subtext. The longer Jenny took with the panels, the later everyone would have to stay.

Jenny paused, considering just signing off and letting it go. After all, the panels had been read, reread, looked at, and reviewed by up to a dozen people during the several rounds of drafts, revisions, layouts, and more. The colorful pages in her folder would be blown up to the size of a small building and hung as a backdrop at the huge medical convention in Chicago for roaming packs of doctors to ignore in their quest for the best free espresso or the most diverting interactive game or the most luscious sales rep. If there were a mistake, it would be in type that was roughly the size of a Xerox machine.

In this particular round, the editor had signed off after finding nothing but a few art issues — close up this space a hair, are you sure the logo is flush right with the block of copy, is the blue on this page the same as the previous pages or is it just a printer problem? The editor had found no copy mistakes, a miracle given his heavy hand with the red pen.

Jenny picked up her green pen to initial the cover sheet, then stopped. The editor had had it in for her ever since she’d thrown him under the bus for an error that had crept into print. It had cost the agency about fifty thousand to correct and someone was going to take the fall. Jenny already had a couple of strikes against her and had managed to buck that one to the editor. He hadn’t been pleased. Tonight, it would be just like him to leave an error in and somehow make sure she was blamed. But he had already initialed the top page, so they were both on the hook, if it came to that.

“No worries if you need more time,” Traffic lied. Tomorrow, the whole agency would know that Jenny had held up the job and kept everyone here an extra hour. Gordo would know.

“I just finished,” Jenny lied right back. “I was just about to sign off.”

She initialed the top page with a flourish, silently praying that the text was perfect. She couldn’t afford another error.

Jenny was idly straightening her desk, surfing the Web, waiting for Traffic to bring around the release copy for final sign-off, allowing her to leave, when she saw Carol come up the aisle to her cube, right across from Jenny’s. She gave a groan. Carol was the dimmest bulb in the agency and Jenny generally ignored her. But it was late and she was tired of checking Facebook and Twitter.

“Carol, what’s up?”

“Got a call that some genius in the studio dropped out a whole page of the sales aid. The team all got called in to restore it and sign off again.” Carol shrugged out of her coat and hung it on the cube wall hook. She sighed. “I actually had a date.”

“Really? That sucks.” Jenny hadn’t had a date in months. Advertising wasn’t conducive to relationships and the men inside the industry were all notoriously either gay or sadistic, or sometimes both.

Carol sat in her office chair, punched out an extension on her office phone, and told her team’s Traffic that she was in.

She swiveled around to face Jenny.

“You guys are going late again?”

“Blame the FDA. We had released a set of convention panels early, and now they make a label change at the last minute.”

“I thought you had a grace period before label changes had to go into effect.”

“We do. But the client insists that we show the FDA how on top of it we are and get them done for Chicago. It’s going to cost them half a million to rush these things through.”

“Ka-ching, ka-ching. The agency loves that sound.”

“Sure. And the hell with the human cost. Late nights. No sleep. No social life. So, tell me about your date.”

“Ah, it probably wouldn’t have worked out. Even if I didn’t have to leave before the tiramisu. I wouldn’t have gone out with him again anyway. He reminded me too much of my uncle. I mean, I loved my uncle, but I wouldn’t want to date him.”

Jenny raised her eyebrows.

“My dead uncle. Rest his soul. Just last year. Cancer.”

“Sorry,” Jenny murmured. Christ, this is why she always shut Carol out. Conversations like this one.

“Yeah, thanks. You know, I was there. I was with him at the end.”

Jenny shook her head, looking up the aisle to see if Traffic was coming back yet. Carol was rattling on about her relative’s difficult last days. Carol was too sincere for Jenny’s taste. She didn’t have the hard edge that Jenny required in her friends. But Traffic was nowhere to be seen. She glimpsed Gordo skulking past the head of the aisle. He flicked a glance in her direction. She felt a chill.

Jenny had fairly successfully timed Carol out, but now she snapped back around. Something Carol said had caught her attention.

“What? Sorry, Carol, I was distracted for a minute.”

“Oh, I was just saying that at the end he was in such awful pain, even with all the morphine they could give him, and he begged me. He begged me to help him. I had seen the nurse checking the connection on the morphine drip that went to the automated monitor that lets only so much through at certain intervals, and I knew that there was a manual override. So, when the nurse wasn’t around I turned the little thingy to open it and let it flow.”

Jenny held her breath and nodded for her to go on.

“So I watched as he felt better. He smiled at me and looked drowsy and then he closed his eyes. I waited until he stopped breathing before I tightened the connection again. Then a machine started beeping and I sat down and took his hand. The nurse came in to check. She told me he was gone. He had a DNR, so there was no fuss. And they were expecting it, so there were no questions. I felt good. I knew it was the right thing to do.”

Jenny nodded again, then impulsively got up and took Carol’s hand. Carol teared up a little at the unexpected sympathy. And at that moment, Traffic hurried down the aisle to tell Jenny that, no worries, they were going to do a group sign-off in the studio, then she could leave.

Jenny took her coat and bag and followed Traffic, pausing only to tell Carol good night. “Thanks for telling me about your uncle,” she said, giving Carol a pat on the shoulder. “I think you were wonderful to do what you did for him.”

“Thanks for being such a good listener.” Carol had always thought Jenny didn’t like her and she warmed to the possibility that she had won her over.

She didn’t notice the triumphant glitter in Jenny’s eyes. Carol was right. Now Jenny liked her. Carol’s little story was a gift. A gift Jenny could use. Carol had just unwittingly confessed to murder. Just that quickly Jenny had a plan.

The next afternoon it only took a second to slip the top piece of paper out of the job jacket on Carol’s chair. When Carol came back from the ladies’ room, she studied the job for a minute, leafing through the papers, before she called her team’s Traffic.

“I already signed off on this round. We all did. Shouldn’t there be a new one?”

Jenny could hear Traffic sputtering on the phone, then he came over to check the job jacket himself. Then he stormed away to see if the missing page was still on the editor’s desk. And before long, it was official: Carol’s entire team would be working late. Again.

Jenny and Carol ate their Chinese takeout from the waxy cartons at their desks. Jenny went to the ladies’ room and, on the way back, sauntered up and down the aisles of cubes, making sure no one else was in earshot of their aisle. Resuming her desk chair, she leaned back and stretched, glancing over at Carol, who gave her a touchingly pleading look. Jenny smiled an invitation and Carol wheeled her desk chair over for a cozy chat.

“Tell me about your family,” she begged. “I’m embarrassed that I did all the talking last night. You must have been so bored.”

“Not at all, Carol. I was fascinated. I’m so glad we’re getting to be friends.”

Carol beamed and clapped her hands together. “Me too,” she said fervently.

Jenny leaned forward. “I want us to be friends. Best friends. Can we do that, do you think, Carol?”

Carol couldn’t believe her good fortune. After all, Jenny was known for her skills and her wit. Her snarky sendups of bosses, colleagues, and clients were the talk of the agency. Carol was nodding like a bobble-head doll. “Yes. Yes, we can. I don’t have that many friends. I mean, I do, but not like, not like you.” She was babbling.

Jenny took her hand and leaned closer to whisper intimately. “I’m so glad. Because we need to be the best, best friends if we’re going to kill Gordo.”

Carol’s smile faltered, then grew bigger. “Yes! You are wild, Jenny. You are so funny. Kill Gordo.” She brayed the laugh that had always set Jenny’s teeth on edge. “If only.”

Jenny waited patiently while Carol’s laugh petered out, her smile stuttered and stopped, and her eyes got big and round. Finally, Carol put her hand to her mouth as if she were going to be sick.

“You mean it,” she whispered.

“Actually, to be more precise, you are going to kill Gordo. I’m going to help. Then we’ll be each other’s alibis, although we shouldn’t need to. It will look like an accident, after all.”

Carol’s head shook no, rapidly and repeatedly, but she said only, “Why me?”

Jenny replied in a sweetly rational tone. “Well, one, because you’re not on his team and you have no reason to kill him, and two, because I have leverage on you — the little incident with your uncle and all — but you have no leverage on me. So, if I kill him, there would be nothing to stop you from telling people that I did it.”

Carol looked at her speculatively.

Jenny tapped the side of her phone with its built-in recording feature. “Did I mention that I have that business with your uncle on tape?” It was a lie but Jenny was betting that Carol would believe it.

“I can’t do it,” Carol whispered. “I can’t just kill someone.”

“You’ve done it before.”

Carol watched her for a couple of beats, her face slack, then she grabbed for her recycling basket and heaved into it, a steaming batch of moo shu pork flying from her stomach.

Jenny adroitly scooted her chair back to avoid splatter and waited patiently until Carol was finished. She passed her a fistful of Kleenex and watched her wipe her mouth and her sweaty brow.

There, she thought to herself. That wasn’t so hard.

The top account execs at Nathan and Massey were allowed their eccentricities. Gordo kept snakes. Another one played country music in her office — letting it blare at top volume — playing one ghastly song over and over for weeks, then inexplicably segueing to another hellish ballad. No one said a word. A third zipped around the halls on a motorized scooter that the agency had bought for a special client presentation. This braying jackass whizzed around, endangering subordinates and scaring the crap out of the unsuspecting. Fine. Word was that for the über-bosses, anything goes. They were reportedly allowed one hissy fit per week without penalty. No matter how unreasonable.

Gordo had once famously banned all baked goods from the premises. You couldn’t bring in homemade brownies, Dunkin’ Donuts, or any other high-carb delight to help you get through the day. All because that asshole Gordo had a severe peanut allergy.

So, Jenny reasoned, it would be easy for Carol to add ground peanuts to Gordo’s nightly stir-fry. The restaurant would deny it, but hey, stuff happened.

Carol stopped snuffling and her face took on a crafty look.

“What about his EpiPen?”

Jenny smiled at her approvingly. “I’ll take care of the EpiPen. That will be my part of the deal.”

Carol nodded. Jenny would have hugged her if she weren’t so disgusting. Carol was in.

When her phone chimed the next day and Gordo’s name appeared on the ID readout, Jenny almost panicked. She fought down a scream and picked up the phone.

“Hey, Gordo. What’s up?”

“Come into my office, will you?”

It wasn’t a question. Damn. She was going to get fired before she could put her plan in motion.

“Sure. Right away.”

She was trembling as she entered his office.

“Shut the door.”

She sank into a chair. The snakes, inert behind the terrarium glass, watched her unblinkingly. Now and then one let his forked tongue flick out — the reptile equivalent of licking his chops, Jenny thought irrelevantly.

Gordo, too, watched her as if he were getting ready to strike.

“So? What’s up?” She tried to sound cheerful and unconcerned. Her mouth was dry and her palms were damp.

“I don’t want to fill that copy supe slot just yet,” Gordo said. “Can you cope for a while longer?”

“What? Oh, sure. No problem.”

“I know this puts extra pressure on you, but there will be some changes in the near future.”

Changes like her departure, no doubt.

“Sure. Whatever you need.”

“I knew I could count on you, Jenny.” He was actually sneering at her, mocking her openly.

She nodded weakly.

“Evaluations are due next week. Let’s set up a time to meet.”

He couldn’t have been more clear. He would give her a bad evaluation and fire her then.

Obediently, she brought her BlackBerry out of her pocket and leaned her elbows on his desk to thumb down her calendar. She managed to tip over a ceramic mug and pencils, pens, and highlighters rolled in all directions across Gordo’s desk and onto the floor. Great. Now Jenny’s humiliation was complete.

“Sorry, Gordo,” she whispered. She gathered the errant objects and stuffed them into the mug.

Gordo laughed meanly.

“How about we meet for that evaluation next Monday at ten?”

Jenny managed a smile as she backed out of his office.

How about we die first, asshole, she thought smugly. In her fist, Jenny held Gordo’s EpiPen.

Jenny thought that Carol would pass out as they circled the conference room table, checking the dozen Chinese food containers for their orders. She jabbed Carol in the ribs with her elbow as the night editor left with his pork chow fun. Jenny pointed her chopsticks at a waxy carton with Gordo’s standard order scribbled on the top. Sweating and shaking, Carol opened it and poured the contents of the baggie inside and stirred it with her finger. She had just closed it up when Traffic strolled in.

“You’re kung pao chicken, right?” Jenny asked, pointing with her chopsticks to the right container.

“No worries. Thanks, Jenny.”

Traffic showed no sign of noticing that Carol was having a full-scale anxiety attack.

Jenny picked up Carol’s dish and her own and steered her to the door. Carol allowed herself to be led blindly, stumbling against the doorframe as Gordo passed her coming in.

“Hey, Gordo,” Jenny said cheerfully, giving him a jaunty wave.

He gave her a nod and his lizard grin.

“Ladies.” The sibilant seemed to linger in the air like a hiss.

Jenny pushed Carol ahead of her and they made their way back to their cubicles. Carol slumped into her chair and shook her head as Jenny put the Chinese food container in front of her.

“Act normal, for God’s sake. Just eat dinner and finish up your work.”

Carol nodded mutely.

Jenny reached down and took the empty baggie from Carol’s clenched fist.

“I’ll keep this safe until we’re in the clear.”

Too late, Carol reached for it.

Jenny whisked it out of range, then smiled and pocketed the baggie. “It’s got both our prints on it. Just consider it insurance. We’re in this together.”

Carol nodded miserably and had just opened her Chinese food container when the first scream came.

Jenny reacted first and raced toward the sound. Gordo had staggered from his office, his face a ghastly red, already covered with welts, one hand outstretched like a movie zombie. The other hand was in his mouth, horribly, as if he were trying to eat himself. His eyes bulged. His khakis were wet in front where he had urinated.

Traffic had dropped a job jacket and screamed again, backing away from him, mesmerized, unable to turn and run. Gordo fell to one knee, holding himself up with his free hand and now, around his other hand, brown vomit was dribbling down his chin.

The few late workers popped up out of their cubicles like meerkats and came to find out what was happening. No one was reacting except to stare numbly.

“It’s anaphylaxis,” Jenny yelled. “Where’s his EpiPen?” She raced past Gordo, stepping on his hand where he was bracing himself upright. He made a sound, like he was trying to scream or gasp, a high-pitched horrible whistling sound, and fell onto his side.

Jenny rummaged around his desk, overturning his mug of pens, scattering them further as she pawed through them.

“Don’t touch him,” she screamed as she saw Traffic start to bend down. “Don’t!”

She couldn’t risk someone clearing his airway. She slipped the EpiPen out of her pocket and flung it under the credenza.

“Get help,” Jenny yelled, yanking open desk drawers and tossing the contents at random. “Call nine-one-one.”

Traffic raced to the nearest cubicle and Jenny could hear her stammering their office address and floor number into the phone.

Gordo had curled into a fetal position, his eyes rolled back, exposing blood-streaked whites, his face a livid red, welt-covered, inhuman. The ghastly wheezing, whistling sound stopped. His hand slipped out of his mouth and settled beside his head. Bloody vomit bubbled from his open mouth.

Jenny stepped over him and stood, breathing hard, with her colleagues, Carol among them, who had gathered, whimpering and crying, in the hallway.

“It’s too late,” Carol whispered. “Gordo’s dead.”

Jenny knelt and felt his neck for a pulse as she’d seen cops do on TV. Carol was right.

The cops, along with the emergency response team, arrived within minutes, although it felt like hours.

Jenny had herded her weeping, shocked, scared coworkers into the conference room to wait. All younger than she by a decade, now they looked less like sophisticated young professionals and more like the children they were. Carol sat apart from the others in a daze. Jenny took her hand and held it, squeezing hard enough to hurt. Carol winced but didn’t say anything or even look at her.

When the elevator chimed, Jenny went to meet the police and ambulance crew as they poured out into the hallway.

“This way.” She led them to Gordo’s corpse and stood back as they worked over him, confirming that he could not be brought back. The EMT in charge stood and shook his head.

“Looks like a massive allergic reaction. I smelled nuts on his emesis. Did he have a peanut allergy, do you know?”

Jenny nodded. “Yes, we all knew about it. He was very careful. But where’s his EpiPen? He always had one on his desk. I tried. I looked for it.” Her voice broke a little and she shuddered.

The cop nearest to Jenny turned to her, his notebook in his hand.

“I asked the others to wait in the conference room. I hope that’s okay.” Jenny teared up prettily and hugged herself. The cop nodded at his colleague, who moved off in the direction Jenny indicated.

“Let’s sit down for a minute. You’ve had quite a shock.”

Jenny nodded gratefully and they went to a nearby lounge to sit.

“Do you always work so late?”

Jenny told him all about the terrible evening. The work, the standard order of Chinese food, the scream from Traffic, the frantic search for his EpiPen as Gordo seemed to eat his own hand.

“People in crisis do all kinds of strange things,” the cop commented, writing. Jenny smiled.

“Right. Sure.”

Everything took about an hour, although like Gordo’s death itself, it seemed to take much longer. Someone came and took Gordo away in a neat black zippered bag. A cop had been dispatched to the hapless Chinese restaurant, which was probably in for a bad night.

One of the officers found the EpiPen on the floor of Gordo’s office. Jenny volunteered that Gordo had knocked over the pen mug earlier that day and she was certain she had seen it among the writing implements. She had picked it up and put it back herself.

The officer put away his notebook and patted Jenny’s hand.

“Don’t beat yourself up. It’s not your fault.”

The agency’s creative director arrived and spoke with the police and then the staff, giving them the next day off, half-day actually, he amended. He promised to bring in a counselor to help them deal with the grief.

Guilty looks were exchanged. They were shocked, but grief was not their paramount emotion.

The EMTs were gone. The police were pulling on their jackets and hats, still talking to the CD. The cop who had spoken to Jenny was going back through the pages of his notebook. They glanced back at her where she stood with her coworkers.

Jenny stiffened as the cops stood there while the CD walked purposefully in her direction. She caught a startled glance from Carol and suppressed a desire to run.

The CD thanked Jenny for her quick reactions and for keeping the staff from panicking. He actually hugged her briefly, in front of everyone. When Jenny turned around, the cops were gone.

Traffic called a car service to take everyone home.

And that, as they say, was that.

Gordo’s door remained closed and locked. Looking in the vertical glass panel beside the door, you could see that they had removed the terrariums, the snakes, and all of the personal effects. The desk was clean and empty. Two chairs stood by. The credenza was polished and the walls held no posters, whiteboards, or art.

Carol moved to another cubicle and studiously avoided Jenny. She never spoke another word to her. Jenny left her alone. Carol was scared. Carol was safe. Carol was no threat to her.

A funny story swept the agency. It seemed that two nights after Gordo’s death, a woman on the night cleaning staff was frightened almost to death when she got off the elevator and found a snake, dead, coiled up in the hallway. Several wags suggested it was Gordo come back to make mischief.

But one art director, a friend of Gordo’s, had a better explanation. It seemed that Gordo had come in one day to find the lid to a terrarium askew and one of his snakes missing. He had rushed out and bought a replacement snake so that no one would notice the empty terrarium. But he started staying late, roaming the offices and cubes, looking for the missing reptile. He was sure that he would be fired if one of his pets scared an employee. He knew that he was allowed his eccentricities but this would be going too far. Way too far. But no matter how many extra hours he put in searching, he never could find the errant snake.

By the following Wednesday, the gossip was dying down. Everyone who had been there that night had regaled his or her colleagues with tales of various acts of heroism that fateful night, all invented and embellished. Jenny herself had contributed a hilarious sendup of the creative director. “A terrible tragedy,” she intoned in his unctuous voice, “so take a day off to grieve. Well, after a halfday off, we’ll all join hands to feel our loss. Actually, let’s gather early tomorrow and have a moment of silence.”

Everyone had loved it. So it was disconcerting when Jenny was called to the creative director’s office. Traffic, who had been sent to summon her, must have sensed Jenny’s hesitation. “No worries, Jenny. I think it’s good news.”

Jenny’s heart leapt. The new definition of redundant: Kill your boss and get a promotion. She walked down the long hallway to the big corner office with a light step, almost skipping, humming to herself. “Isn’t it redundant? Da da, da di, di da.”

The CD’s admin nodded her in and when she opened his door and saw Carol sitting on his sofa, Jenny’s smile faltered only slightly.

“Carol. CD. What’s up? You wanted to see me?”

Carol looked strange, almost frightened. Jenny’s heart sank. She glared a warning but Carol squirmed slightly in her chair and wouldn’t meet her eyes.

“CD?”

“Jenny, I want to thank you again for taking charge last week. That was a terrible thing for this agency. For all of us.” He shook his stylishly barbered head. “A terrible thing.”

Jenny nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

“But I have a clear idea of what Gordo had intended for his team and I want to honor his wishes.”

Jenny looked at the floor. Damn. Damn Gordo to hell. He had reached up from the grave to fire her. It was all for nothing. She had killed Gordo for nothing. Was there no justice?

The CD was rattling on in his unctuous tones about Gordo’s hard work and great leadership, skills that he had valued in Jenny herself. Jenny’s head snapped up.

“So now we’re looking at the job of copy supervisor on Gordo’s team. The job has gone empty long enough and I know that Gordo meant to promote you into it.”

Jenny’s eyes widened. She put her hand to her mouth. Her breath caught. Gordo. Gordo had valued her. Liked her, even. Gordo had intended to promote her. And she had killed him. She looked up to smile at the CD, but caught him glancing at Carol. Wait. Carol? What was wrong with this picture?

“But at the end of the day, I have to satisfy all our fine account execs and some of them feel that Carol also displays all those qualities. So what are we to do?”

He was looking at her brightly, although it was almost certainly a rhetorical question. She tried to look confident, interested. She couldn’t risk a look at Carol for fear she might leap up and strangle her.

“So,” the CD went on, “I have decided to wait a little while. I’m sure this will sort itself out very quickly.”

Carol was nodding and smiling. Jenny tried to do the same. The CD stood up and shook both their hands. “Better to have these things out in the open,” he said fatuously. “I’m a believer in complete transparency,” he lied.

Jenny and Carol left his office and Carol walked quickly away.

That night, as usual, the two teams were working late. Traffic had just called to tell Jenny the Chinese food was in the conference room when Carol appeared at her cubicle bearing two waxy white cartons. She put Jenny’s order down on her desk, along with chopsticks and napkins.

“I thought we should talk.” Jenny watched stone-faced as Carol pulled the desk chair from her old cube and rolled it over to Jenny’s, sitting and opening her own carton.

“You deserve that promotion,” Carol said sweetly. “You worked for it.” She lowered her voice. “You killed for it.”

Jenny opened her mouth to contradict her but Carol said quickly, “It was your plan. You deserve the credit. And the reward.”

Jenny nodded and opened her own Chinese food, as if this were a normal conversation between two colleagues.

“So, tomorrow I’m going to tell the CD to take me out of the race.”

Jenny stopped eating and stared at her.

“I don’t want to compete with you. After all, we’re friends, aren’t we?”

Jenny was still suspicious. Could Carol be for real? What an idiot. “Thanks, Carol. Are you sure?”

“Jenny, I’ve never been so sure of anything.”

Jenny couldn’t believe her luck. She felt her face flush, her heart race. She was going to get the promotion. She was safe.

Carol was smiling at her.

Jenny’s breathing grew more labored. Light-headed, she panted slightly, trying to take in enough air. Her peripheral vision seemed to contract. Carol.

“Carol?” With an effort, Jenny managed to stutter the one word.

Carol was watching her placidly. “Everything okay?”

Jenny stood unsteadily, her breathing ragged, her vision blurred. Her face itched, her arms and chest too. She scratched at her face, feeling welts that seemed to erupt and when she looked down she saw bloody pus on her fingers.

Carol was standing now too, still calmly watching. Jenny staggered to the end of the aisle, into the hallway, trying to call for Traffic, trying to scream.

Some of her colleagues were coming back from the conference room with food containers. She put out a hand to stop them, mewling, her voice gone, her breathing ragged. With mounting horror, she felt her bladder give way.

“Look,” Carol announced behind her. “Jenny’s doing Gordo. What a riot!”

Colleagues popped up and gathered around, giggling nervously.

“Look, she’s got the red welts and the zombie walk down perfectly,” Carol was laughing. Wikipedia had promised that the symptoms would mimic peanut allergy, but this was surprisingly perfect.

Sure enough, several of her coworkers were laughing and pointing. Jenny felt her airway constricting. Weakened, she dropped to her knees. She forced a hand into her swollen mouth. If she could make herself vomit maybe she could live.

“Oh my God, the hand thing. This is too funny,” someone squealed.

Traffic came at a run. “God, Jenny! No! What’s happening? Is that blood?”

“It’s okay. It’s a goof,” Carol told her. “I think it’s catsup.”

Traffic was grinning, still a little uncertain. Jenny tried to call to her, tried to signal, something. Anything.

She fell over on her side and felt her eyes roll up. She could still hear the delighted shrieks of her colleagues, laughing uproariously. Laughing at her.