Ptikobj

    "Tom?" I looked up from my work. Tom worked in an office overlooking the street. He never took visitors. "Tom?" Family, maybe? The voice was female.
    "Excuse me, do you know where Tom Roth might be?" I couldn't see the visitor from where I was.
    "He's the one who works in two-three-two, right?" Another voice came from my right- Frank Julius' cubicle.
    "I don't know, he never talks about work."
    "Yeah, I think that guy's named Tom."
    "Two-three-two; thanks." The woman started up the hall. I looked over my shoulder and saw a flap of blue fabric round the corner. She was heavily perfumed; violet and orange wavered for a few moments in her wake. I stood up and peered over the divider into Frank's cubicle. He grinned and gave a thumbs up.

    In the wake of 2005's sexual abuse legal proceedings and fees, profits in most recent years have been markedly lower. Due to both the bad press and large legal costs, customers have been discouraged from seeking services, and as a result, rumblings of stockholder discontent have begun to emerge. To avoid situations like the one we currently face, the public relations department proposes several courses of action.
 1: Settlements
    a) In the event of civil action against Platcom, the Mannweil formula should be applied. Projected fees exceeding ten percent of the result will, without exception, be settled out of court.
    b) Legal proceedings in criminal court will be left to the individual employee. In special circumstances (see end notes), Platcom may provide for up to twenty percent of legal fees.
    c) Class-action or Union suits will be settled out of court if the projected fees exceed seventy percent of Mannw
    A dull "crack" interrupted my work. I stood up and looked around, trying to determine the source. A few others, I saw, had done the same. We all looked around the hall, then at each other. Olivia, who worked near the elevator, shrugged at me. Nothing seemed out of place.
    "Maybe a bird flew into a window?"
    "No, that happened a few months ago. It sounded like-" she slammed her open palm on the desk- "that."
    "Maybe...someone dropped their-"
    A scream came from Tom Roth's office. His secretary, Janice, had seemingly known exactly where the noise had come from. Half the floor rushed over.
    "What's going on?"
    "What's- oh my God!"
    "Shit!"
    "Oh my God, oh my God!"
    Twenty of us crowded into the office. Thomas Roth slumped in his executive leather high-back chair. There was a large hole above his mouth. A modest trickle of blood ran down his face and dripped from his chin. A shell casing, nestled in the green carpet, shone brightly.
    "Ok, nobody touch anything." Olivia covered her mouth as she said this.
    "Oh my God, Tom!" Janice reached out to touch his cheek.
    "Don't touch him! Everyone out, now! We have to call the police."
    I smelled oranges. Frank seemed to make the connection as well. We scanned the faces in the office, looking for anyone unfamiliar.
    "I'm calling from Platcom offices on third street. One of our employees has been shot; I think he's dead. No, I don't know. We don't have one. Yes, I'll stay on the line. Thank you."
    A flash of blue moved through the crowd. I followed the spot until it grew into a blue dress. My eyes moved up the dress, taking in a column of black buttons and a silver brooch in the shape of a pine tree. Her neck was thin and pale. I reached her face, and I recoiled. Under the makeup, I'm sure there was a face. Her mouth was splashed with maroon lipstick, smeared at the corner. Her eyes had black rims of mascara an inch wide. She smiled gently, then turned around and called the elevator. She held a small semiautomatic pistol.
    "You, stop!" Frank had noticed the woman. "Stop right there! Mark, that's her! Stop!"
    "Shut up, you idiot!"
    A second shot rang out. Frank's head snapped back and he collapsed. The employees screamed and dropped to the floor. The woman entered the elevator and the doors closed. I knelt next to Frank and inspected him. The bullet had lodged in his forehead, just off-center. He opened his eyes and his lips trembled. His left leg began to twitch.
    "Don't move, Frank, just hold still."
    The police and paramedics arrived six minutes later. The left leg was still twitching as they carried him off.
    "I need to ask you all to stay here," said an officer who carried a tape recorder and a notebook. "We're going to be taking statements for the next couple hours. If the interviews go past six PM, the department will provide dinner for those of you remaining."
    Olivia and I sat next to each other on a couch in the lobby. We hardly spoke, except to say "I'm gonna go get some coffee." I called my ex and told her to go pick up our son, because "It's taking at least an hour for each person." Olivia played Hearts on her laptop.
    "Who do you think it was?" she asked, dragging cards around the screen.
    "I thought she was a relative at first."
    "She did speak like one."
    "Do you think it was his wife? Is he married?"
    "Was he married- I don't know." She lost to a computer player named NeoCon. "Did you see her face?" She shuddered and closed the "Hearts" window.
    "Frank seemed to think she was pretty good-looking, do you think-"
    "She put on the makeup in the office?"
    "Tom must have known her; if a stranger made themselves up like that in my office-"
    "So who was it?"
    "Well, I didn't really know Tom. I don't know who it could be. Did you ever meet him properly?"
    "No. He might have a daughter. I heard him telling Janice about 'Ramona's big game' once. It could have been a niece or cousin, though."
    "Do the police really think one of us did this? We've been here for five hours."
    "Shoulda brought a book."
    "Well, if I'd known two of our coworkers would be killed and we'd be held responsible, I would have."
    "You don't know that Frank's dead," she said quickly. We both fell silent.
    "This is so fucked up."
    She didn't respond.
    "How could something like this even happen? It's like a movie or something." She opened a Firefox window and began typing on her blog.
    "The cops probably won't want you doing that." She continued typing.
"I'm gonna go get some coffee." I stood up and headed towards the in-house Starbucks.
     The baristas had been detained as well, and were tending the machines for overtime until it was their turn to be questioned. I came to the shop often, and so the employees all knew what I preferred. I placed a five on the counter and watched Terry pull levers and pour cream.
    I received my change and headed back to the lobby. When I arrived at the benches, Olivia was gone. I sat down and took a sip of coffee. The lobby was completely empty, save for the officer guarding the door. There was no magazine rack, no television, and the sound system had been shut off by the police. This was in part a blessing; were they operational, the speakers would be piping Jewel and Hot Hot Heat into the room. Still, the silence bothered me. The officer's walkie-talkie beeped and then let out a burst of static.
    A man wearing a tan jacket and a blue tie exited the office across from the receptionist's podium. He was unmistakably a police officer. I stood up to meet him.
    "ID, please." He held out his hand and a portable bar code reader. I handed him my card and he scanned it. "Marcus O'Dell?"
    "Yes, but I prefer Mark." He handed my card back.
    "Follow me," he said, pretending not to hear my comment.

    I had been in the office only once before; my prospective employee interview had taken place here three years prior. The detective seated himself behind the mahogany desk. There was a mercury bulb "drinking bird" moving very slightly. He tapped its head, and it began seesawing with renewed vigor.
    "Let's begin."
    "Let's," I said. He simultaneously glared at me and studied my employee file.
    "When did you arrive at work today?"
    "7:25 A.M."
    "What exactly is your job here?"
    "I work as a legal transcriber."    
    "I'm sorry?"
    "I translate notes from policy meetings and planning committees into official documents. For example, if someone writes 'no kids in my god damn office,' I translate it to "Platcom company policy does not allow for children under the age of thirteen in executive offices, due to legal concerns and liabilities."
    "I see." He paused for a moment. He didn't quite know what to say to that. "Did you know the victim directly?" he moved on.
    "There were two victims."    
    "Frank Julius was shot because he knew what the criminal looked like. We're trying to work out why Tom Roth was murdered."
    "No, I didn't know Tom. I just knew his name and saw him walk by every once in a while."
     He scribbled this down in his notebook.
    "So you don't know who would want to hurt him, or why."
    "No."
    "Describe the killer."
    "She wore a blue dress with a silver pine tree brooch. Her mouth was covered with lipstick, and it looked like she had twin black eyes. She smelled like oranges."
    "With blond hair."
    "Yes."
    He sighed and thought quietly for half a minute. I finished my coffee while he pondered. "So, you can't tell me anything about her actual body? Weight, height, skeletal structure?"
    "She had blue eyes."    
    "I know. That's what everyone I've interviewed said. They also said she was wearing a blue dress with black buttons and a silver pine tree brooch. They all said she had makeup splashed all over her face, and they all said she smelled like oranges and violet. None of you happened to look a little harder, and take note of her cheekbones? Her waist? Ass? Anything would help at this point."
    "I didn't care to look at her. She made me intensely nauseous."
    He massaged his eyes. There was silence for almost a minute. "Do you know anyone with long blond hair? With even a minor connection to Tom Roth or just the company itself?"
    "My coworker Olivia, but she was a witness." I racked my brain. "There's a woman on my floor with long blond hair."
    "Andrea."    
    "That's her."
    "She was a witness as well. Do you know anyone on the lower floors?"
    "No."    
    This went on for another twenty minutes, with the detective asking more and more desperate questions, and getting more and more agitated as I answered the way everyone else did. A different officer came in and handed me a sausage hot pocket. When I began eating, the detective fell into contemplative silence.
    As I reached the end of my dinner, he opened his mouth to speak, then closed it. "Is there..." he finally managed, "is there any way...that the killer was not a woman?"
    "I doubt it...she had a woman's voice, and Frank saw her before her face was obscured. He gave me a thumbs-up."
    "What sort of thumbs-up?"
    I put on my best shit-eating grin and leaned back in my chair. I gave him the thumbs-up.
    "I see," he said.
    "It was the 'attractive woman' thumbs-up. I don't imagine that could be applied to a man dressed as a woman."
    "Maybe it was a joke?"    
    "Sir, you're really reaching here."
    "I agree. You can go." He gave me a note telling the door guard I could leave.
    I wasn't surprised to see that Olivia hadn't waited around, but I was a bit disappointed. I normally left around five, and the interviews had kept me in past seven. It got dark early this time of year, and the walk back to my house went through a sketchy bike path. I'd never actually been accosted, or even seen anyone vaguely threatening when I walked through it, but I constantly imagined horrible deaths for myself at the hands of a schizophrenic vagabond. The path ran past a row of houses that looked to be built out of plywood and industrial staples. The city had started a "coastal revival project" by the sides of the path, which meant there was a wide variety of different weeds lining the asphalt. On the other side of the path was a black iron fence that cast looming shadows resembling claws.
    I saw the whites of her eyes peering out from underneath one of the lean-tos. She skittered out onto the path and clicked angrily. I remembered my report. Sexual abuse scandal. Was Tom Roth on the list I never got to transcribe? This woman, was she a plaintiff, scorned by Platcom's out-of-court settlement policy? There was no more time to think. Her fingers curled inward, her mouth opened wide, and she released a scream that rattled pebbles from the dirt lining the dark path.
    Asleep on my feet. The BART train sped past me. Stop thinking about her. You'll never see her again. Not like that, anyway. Stop thinking about her.
    Stop it.
    I didn't return to work for almost a week. My ex took care of Ian for the duration of my truancy, saying I was "in no condition". I didn't argue. I saw the media swarm around our offices. The blue dress and pin were found in a trash bin in the women's restroom. A hairdresser said she remembered the scent of her customer, but not the face. She thought the woman was a lesbian.
    "She pointed at the dykiest woman there, and said 'I want my hair like that.' Not that I've got anything against gays, mind you," she said, holding up her hands in submission, "so I cut it, and she walked out looking like she was going off to a clam bar."
     The police knew better than to search based on that description. A reporter knocked on my door a couple days after the incident, but I told her to fuck off. I saw Olivia on the report the next night. She held her hands at her sides and looked sideways at the camera, avoiding its gaze.
    We were told by way of corporate email that Frank Julius was in stable condition, but unfortunately would not be returning to Platcom. The news reports said he had suffered a massive brain hemorrhage, rendering him speechless and without sight in his left eye.
    He was replaced by a young intern named Lyle Andrews, who chewed two packs of doublemint a day. Whenever I had the misfortune of being spoken to by him, he smacked his lips and gnashed the wad of gum as he spoke, lending a very wet quality to his voice. Despite this disgusting trait, Olivia was somehow quite taken with him, and often ended what I took to be meaningful silences in our conversations by enthusing about his hair or delicate hands.
    "He's a total dreamboat," she said, only half joking.
    "'Dreamboat,'" I repeated flatly.
    "That's right."
    "Do you write his name all over your notebooks? And then draw hearts around them?"
    "If I had notebooks, I would do it."
    "You have a company handbook," I said. "Prime junior-high fantasy real estate."
    "Olivia Flores Andrews...."
    "What will your children be named?"
    "Atticus and Cody."
    "I see."
    Lyle entered the breakroom. He leaned over the trash bin and spat out his gum. He tore out the red strip from his second pack, and took another piece. Olivia was physically affected by his presence. She squirmed slightly as Lyle scanned options on the vending machine. He chose bottled water and left.
    "Such a dreamboat," she sighed quietly.
    "He left some gum in the trash; don't you want it?"
    "Shut up."
    There was a silence. However, as we had just been speaking about Lyle, Olivia had nothing to break it with.
    "What did the police ask you?"
    "What?"
    "What did they ask you about?"
    She looked at the table and frowned slightly. "Stuff."
    I kept quiet.
    "You know, stuff. What she looked like, what I had been doing before the murder. Really uninspired."
    "Uninspired?"
    "Well, they thought maybe he was killed by his wife. I told them his wife was overweight and like fifty years old, then they thought it was a lover. I guess it could be."
    "The guy who interviewed me suggested that 'she' was actually a 'he'."
    "At least he's creative."
    "Sure, but what the fuck?"
    "They did find a padded bra with the clothes in the trash."
    "But everything about her was artificial, why not that too?"
    "Why not a man, if that's the case?"
    "Okay, I'm not saying it couldn't be a man, but why would it be?"
    "Why wouldn't it be?"
    "This is going nowhere."    
    "Yes. Let's talk about my and Lyle's house with a fireplace and a huge window in our bedroom that overlooks the ocean."
    "I don't get what's so great about the ocean."
    "There's whales in it."    
    "Fuck whales."    
    "Fuck you! Whales are amazing."
    "I was a little bit kidding."