When Blanton reached the car, his wife turned to face him.
“All done?” she asked.
He held up the keys. “Everything’s taken care of,” he replied, and they told Jessica goodbye and got in the car. Blanton wondered how long Jessica would stay, if she’d be there for the finale — nursemaid first, corpse-bearer later. He hoped she wouldn’t be drawn into cleaning it all up. A nice girl, she was, and Blanton felt sorry for what she might be forced to witness.
He and Felicia hardly talked on the way back, but things were different already, he could feel it. At one point, there in the silence, she reached over and touched his hand, and he felt a tingling in his loins, a stirring that he’d nearly forgotten. He pressed down slightly on the accelerator, hurrying them homeward.
He had a dose for her too.
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.