Waiting for Armando (Kate Lawrence Mysteries) (2 page)

I carefully stripped down my résumé, substituting phrases like “Marketing Assistant” for my executive titles and striking out most of the supervisory functions I had performed. The result was a still truthful, albeit streamlined, summary of my job experience, guilty only of sins of omission. I faxed it off. By Wednesday I was chatting up Paula Hughes, BGB’s human resources manager. On Thursday
Bellanfonte
himself interviewed me briefly.
 
When I was offered the job on Friday at a very fair salary, I accepted with alacrity.

“You’re crazy,” said my elderly, outspoken neighbor Mary Feeney.

I love Mary, but she’s hardly one to be calling anybody crazy, being more than a little dotty herself. Mary retired in 1985. She now spends her days annoying The Birches’ property manager, who had once been unwise enough to chastise Mary for an oil spot left on her driveway by her disreputable Chevy sedan.

“You managed a staff of ten. Now you’re going to regress to typing and filing?
Jesus, Mary and Joseph!”
She blew a raspberry and hung up.

“You’re out of your gourd,
Mamacita
,” stated my daughter Emma, who has never fully recovered from one semester of high school Spanish. “You were a libber, for God’s sake, and you made darn sure I got my paralegal certification. Now you’re telling me you’re going back to fetching coffee?”

“There’s far more to administrative work these days,” I countered stubbornly.

“Uh huh,” she muttered in disgust and disconnected.

“No way, Ma!” exclaimed my long-haul trucker son Joey when I delivered my news to him along with the spaghetti dinner he had requested for his Sunday night stopover. “You’re a manager, for crying out loud. Now you’re going to type somebody else’s letters?”

“For the moment,” I said, patting his whiskery cheek, which always startled me a little. “It’s temporary, remember.”

“If that is what you really want to do, then of course, you must do it,” said Armando later that evening in his delightfully accented baritone, “but frankly
mi
corazón
, it sounds just a little, how do you say it in English,
loco
?”

“Loco,” I told him a tad tersely. “It’s
loco
in Spanish and loco in English. Nuts, crazy, wacko.
All the
same thing.”

He took my hand in his and brought my fingertips gently to his lips. In the interest of not ruining a perfectly good evening, I allowed him to change the subject.

And so, like a rebellious teenager, I presented myself on Monday, June 16, to BGB’s training coordinator, Beverly Barnard, for my first orientation session. My training, which I was certain would be a breeze, had been scheduled during one of
Bellanfonte’s
lecture tours to give me time to settle in, as he had phrased it. Hah! The truth was that the big weasel had slithered off to lie low during what was known throughout the support staff, I later learned, as Hell Week.

After I filled out half a dozen employment forms, the balance of my first morning was devoted to a mind-boggling introduction to BGB’s word processing and document management software, all of which had been customized to meet the specific needs of a large law firm with offices in multiple states. The training was conducted in spacious, state-of-the-art quarters equipped with ergonomic everything on the thirty-sixth floor. As I enjoyed the comfortable surroundings, it occurred to me that I had never seen my workspace, and I asked Beverly where I would actually be located. I had a vague notion of a small but nicely equipped outer office leading to a tastefully furnished inner sanctum, suitable quarters for the firm’s biggest rainmaker and his executive assistant. If my office turned out to be a big smaller than those to which I had been accustomed, well, I would graciously adapt.

Beverly ushered me up an enclosed flight of stairs and down a narrow aisle, stopping in front of one of the offices that rimmed the exterior wall of the thirty-seventh floor. I peeked inside. Piles of paper and
Redwell
files overflowed a large desk, and cardboard file boxes were stacked everywhere. A credenza behind the desk held books and more files, and a computer workstation filled the gap between the two pieces of furniture. I was surprised that the office hadn’t yet been emptied of the previous occupant’s things, but no doubt that would happen before my orientation was completed. I had noticed a painting crew in an office down the hall. Perhaps this one was next on their list. With fresh paint and some nice floor plants, it would suit me fine.

Beverly consulted a pocket directory,
then
turned away from the office into which I had been peering and pointed to a cramped, nasty-looking little cubicle, one of dozens that faced the exterior offices.

“This is you,” said Beverly. “See you after lunch.” She disappeared back down the aisle.

For several seconds my brain refused to engage. The pod, as I would soon learn a secretarial workspace was called, was about twelve by six feet and surrounded by elbow-high barriers. Two desks and two chairs, all
circa
1950, were crammed against the front of the enclosure. A computer workstation occupied fully half of each desk. A clerical worker tapped away at the keyboard on the right side of the pod. She was possibly the most stunning black woman I had ever seen. Soft, brown curls fell to her shoulders, her skin was the color of milk chocolate, and her figure, what I could see of it, was curvaceous. She looked up and gave me a warm smile, charmingly framed in dimples.

“Welcome, pod mate! I’m Charlene Tuttle, Victor
Bolasevich’s
secretary.” Her eyes were pure turquoise and as untroubled as the Caribbean, of which they reminded me.

I can only imagine the picture I must have made with my head swiveling in disbelief from the door of what I now understood was
Bellanfonte’s
office to the pod and back again.

“You’re kidding!” I blurted, and Charlene’s smooth brow furrowed.

I mumbled something about having a headache, blundered to the main elevator lobby, and gritted my teeth during the plunge to the Metro Building’s second-floor cafeteria, where I swallowed two
Advils
, nursed a cup of tea, and rehearsed how I would confront my new boss at the first opportunity.

Since
Bellanfonte
was safely on the west coast, however, there was no one to confront for the moment. I reminded myself that however ludicrous my situation might be, it was only temporary. That thought got me through the afternoon training session on the firm’s hellishly complex system for recording each lawyer’s time in six-minute increments, and shortly after five, I slunk home through the rush hour traffic on autopilot. Two glasses of Pinot
Grigio
later, I had convinced myself that first impressions were often
misleading,
I was probably overreacting, blah
blah
blah
. I put myself to bed.

But the next day was more of the same: training on spreadsheet software, training on the telephone system, training on electronic mail and calendar maintenance. Again, my only break was at noon, and I returned to the thirty-seventh floor to take another look at my workspace, determined to be objective.
 
After all, I lectured
myself,
the firm could hardly be expected to invest in quarters they would soon be abandoning. Had not
Bellanfonte
himself shown me plans for new offices atop the
CityView
building on which ground would be broken any day now?

On this day I took the interior stairs down from the firm’s data processing department on the thirty-ninth floor. As I passed thirty-eight I gazed wistfully at the elegant reception area in which clients awaited their expensive attorneys. Then I proceeded doggedly to thirty-seven. This time I noticed an array of cheesy photographs on the stairwell walls, four eight-by-ten enlargements of old,
Caucasian
men. The prints were amateurishly framed and hung askew on carpet tacks banged into the walls.
Portraits of the founding fathers, no doubt.

The door leading from the stairwell to the main corridor jammed on some duct tape that patched a three-corner tear in the carpeting, so I had to yank it open. I turned right and traversed the narrow aisle until I came to the half-empty double pod outside
Bellanfonte’s
office.

Dismayingly, nothing had changed. Once again, Charlene sat at her computer, typing busily. My space, which struck me as an odd term for quarters so small, was still cramped, dusty and surrounded by cartons of files. The cheap veneer on the desk was held in place with tape in several spots. The computer station looked relatively new, but the transcription machine had a headset that would have done the Marquis de Sade proud.

“So how’s it going?” asked Charlene in an attempt to make conversation as I stood there numbly.

How on earth do you stand this?
I wanted to shriek, but Charlene appeared to be perfectly composed. “It’s an adjustment,” was what finally came out of my mouth,
and one I have no intention of making,
I finished silently. I sank into the antique secretarial chair and held my leather shoulder bag in my lap like a shield.

“Yes, I remember,” Charlene offered sympathetically. “Listen, I really have to visit the women’s room, and there’s nobody else around to answer the phones. Hey, why don’t you give it a try? These three are Donatello’s lines, and these two are Victor’s. The top two on your console are your lines. The others belong to me, the land analyst in the office next to Donatello’s, and the paralegals behind that partition over there. Just punch this button here whenever you see it blink more than twice, and whoever’s line it is will roll over into your console. I’ll be right back.”

“Wait a minute,” I protested. “Answer all these phones? I mean, aren’t there people here who do that?”

Already halfway down the aisle, Charlene looked over her shoulder at me and chuckled, eyes merry. “Why, yes, and now you’re one of them! By the way, call me
Strutter
. Everyone else does.” She winked and sashayed down the aisle on impossibly curvy legs, leaving no doubt about the derivation of her nickname. Two telephone lines began ringing simultaneously.

By Thursday my pipedreams of simplicity, reflected
glory,
and the esteem of a gracious superior had evaporated.
Bellanfonte
was back in town and popped out of his office continually to bark cryptic orders. He seemed convinced that because it took him ten seconds to outline a task, it should take me no longer to accomplish it. The phones rang incessantly and had to be answered swiftly and professionally. No electronic menus at BGB, no sir. When you paid up to four hundred and fifty dollars an hour for a BGB lawyer’s service, you got a real person on the phone every time.

Then there were the demands of the legal proceedings themselves, which were extraordinary. Add distraught clients, delicate and competing professional egos, and the unrelenting demand for perfection in the face of each day’s thousand-and-one opportunities to screw up, and you have the antithesis of simplicity. You have a tiptoe through the minefields.

As for the reflected glory of working for a top gun, I soon realized that in a law firm, there is no head honcho in whose aura to bask. The managing partnership is up for grabs every couple of years and moves from partner to partner. Attorneys are tolerated by their colleagues in direct proportion to their billable hours, and the number one question on their lips is, how much new business
have
you brought in lately?

Esteem? The cramped, ugly workspaces were only my first clue to the low esteem in which the support staff was held at BGB. Every day in every way, it was made clear to me that law firm personnel fall into two categories:
 
Lawyers and Others. Anyone not in possession of a J.D. and a lucrative client roster was an
Other
, from the HR manager to the office messengers, and of the Others, secretaries were the nameless, faceless krill at the end of the food chain.

What keeps these women here?
I continually asked myself. Charlene and many of the others seemed to be bright, educated and exceptionally able. From what I could see, they kept the firm running smoothly in spite of the interference of the self-important blowhards to whom they reported. Surely, they could do better elsewhere.

Ah, well,
I thought resignedly, returning my notepad to my bag.
It’s only for a while, and the money is good.
I hadn’t realized that it was hazardous duty pay when I accepted the offer, but now that I knew the score, I just had to stick it out long enough to find another job. I dropped my empty cup into a trash barrel and headed back up Trumbull, walking slowly in the midday sauna. I thought fondly of my air conditioned condo and the juicy porterhouse in my refrigerator that
awaited
grilling. I drifted into a daydream that featured a long, cool bubble bath and a large steak sizzling over hot coals.