No! He wasn't going to let some anonymous peon psych him out. He was going to march out of his office and lay a serious smackdown on… whoever.
He started for the door, hoping a brilliant plan would form in his mind before he reached the other side. Instead, the door opened and Marcy leaned in.
"Crowley's here," she said.
Bigelow froze. "So early?"
"Well, it is after 11."
Bigelow swiveled around and hurried back to his desk. He snatched up the phone and started making calls he'd been putting off for days. When Crowley dropped by a few minutes later, Bigelow was on the line with a printer's rep.
Bigelow held up a "just-a-sec" finger as Crowley took a seat.
"Don't give me that!" Bigelow barked, even though he and the rep had been having a perfectly pleasant conversation about the weather just a moment before. "That last cover looked like mud!"
"What?" the rep said, perplexed by the sudden abuse.
"Alright then! That's better!" Bigelow slammed the phone down and shook his head. "Those Lantern Graphics guys-you have to ride their asses every step of the way. So what can I do you for, boss?"
Crowley kicked his tiny feet up on the edge of Bigelow's desk and shrugged his muscle-bound shoulders. "What's goin' on?"
Bigelow passed a hand over the clutter on his desk like one of those models on The Price Is Right who specialize in gesturing seductively over cars and boxes of Turtle Wax.
"Same ol' same ol," he said. "How 'bout with you?"
"I caught the new Matrix flick Saturday."
"Oh yeah? What did you think?"
And they were off.
This was how Bigelow really earned his salary-yakking with Crowley. Sometimes he thought it was much, much harder than a real job.
He'd known Crowley since high school, when his now-pumped up boss had been a 101 pound pipsqueak with braces and thick glasses and bad hair. The hair had never improved, but the braces and the glasses eventually went away, as did Crowley's pipsqueak status. During his college years, Crowley had discovered competition bodybuilding, and he eventually dropped out to devote himself to the "sport" full-time. He didn't get far, his crowning glory being fourth place in the Tri-State Mr. Olympus Muscle Show. But he didn't retire from competition with nothing to show for it. For one thing, he now had a body that would do Vin Diesel proud, even if his face would still send Howdy Doody running for plastic surgery. More importantly, he'd laid the foundation for his future empire by publishing a monthly newsletter called Muscle Men.
The newsletter's circulation grew and grew, making a particularly large jump after a marketing consultant convinced Crowley to change the name to something that didn't sound like a guide to local leather bars. So Muscle Men became Muscles Now!. It also became a magazine. And it made Crowley rich enough to start magazines devoted to the two other great loves of his life: movies and antique Mason jars. (Jars Now! became Antiques Now! after one disastrous issue.)
When Crowley's company grew large enough to require an office manager, he'd hired his old high school buddy Bigelow, who'd been handing out pictures from behind the desk at a Wal-Mart Photo Developing Center. Through a tenacious campaign of butt-kissing and back-stabbing, Bigelow had risen to circulation assistant, then circulation manager, then director of circulation and finally, after one more carefully orchestrated character assassination, director of circulation and production.
Of course, he wasn't through rising yet, as there was one more director-level position that naturally belonged on his résumé. But for every chance he got to slag off Sandberg, he had to endure 20 minutes of talk about weightlifting and a brutal 30 minutes about Mason jars. The only relief came when he and Crowley talked about movies, but even then he was hemmed in and frustrated. Once upon a time he could-and would-tell Crowley he was an idiot to think that Return of the Jedi was the best Star Wars movie and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was better than Raiders of the Lost Ark. But that had been in high school. These days, Crowley could say Attack of the Clones was better than Citizen Kane and Bigelow would have to nod thoughtfully and say, "Yeah. That lightsaber duel with Count Dooku was sweet."
And even that simple, if irritating, act of yes-man boot-licking seemed to be beyond Bigelow just now. As Crowley droned on and on about how many "reps" he'd managed in the gym that morning, Bigelow's mind wandered the hallways of the Now! office, stopping at the desks of his seven suspects. Five of them would be easy to deal with. They were designers and editors, mere bugs to be squashed beneath his managerial boot heel. But what if his Secret Santa was Peter Jarry, the comptroller? Maybe Jarry had noticed the charges for pay-per-view porn and room-service filet mignon that always piled up on Bigelow's bill when he went on company trips. Maybe he even knew those company trips were completely bogus, as Bigelow only insisted on doing personal press checks for Antiques Now!, which was printed at a plant 25 miles from Disney World.
Or perhaps it was Sandberg. He couldn't be as innocent as he appeared. His image was squeaky clean-never gossiped, worked hard, took care of his staff, blah blah blah, exactly the kind of goody two-shoes b.s. that reminded Bigelow what a fraud he himself truly was.
It had to be an act. Or maybe Sandberg had simply seen the writing on the wall, toughened up and launched a pre-emptive strike. He could be trying to throw Bigelow off, psych him out.
Well, if that was his plan, he…
"Bro, are you even listening to me?"
Bigelow blinked away the pleasing vision of Sandberg roasting over a barbecue pit.
"Of course," he said. "And I couldn't agree more."
What he'd agree with, he soon found out, was that Atlas Strong Shoulder Jars might indeed replace Ball Perfect Mason Jars as the most popular fruit jar collectibles in their class. Seemingly satisfied that Bigelow would back him up on this controversial assertion, Crowley plowed on. But Bigelow had the uncomfortable feeling that the publisher was watching him closely now, looking for signs that he wasn't paying attention. Bigelow overcompensated by laughing a little too uproariously at Crowley's strained pun on the phrase "Ball Perfect" and becoming a little too incensed when his boss described attempts to pass off irradiated selenium jars as amber.
Mercifully, Crowley eventually drifted off jars and onto business. That gave Bigelow the opportunity to insert not one, not two, but three separate digs at Sandberg into the conversation before Crowley finally arose-nearly two hours after he sat down-and went off to his own office to look over dummy covers and sign checks.
Bigelow felt drained by the meeting, but he had no choice. With Crowley hanging around the rest of the day, he actually had to stay in his office and at least keep up the appearance of diligence. He made half-hearted progress on his in-box (which was more progress than he usually made), all the while trying to figure out how to strip Santa of his secret.
In the end, he could only come up with one solution. He'd always hated logic puzzles and guessing games. No one was going to tell him, and he didn't want to ask. He didn't have a spycam or a fingerprinting kit. He didn't know how to rig a grenade with a trip-wire and he wasn't sure where to get a grenade or a trip-wire even if he did.
He would have to rely on simple snooping. And with nearly everyone working extra late to hit their deadlines, that wouldn't be an option today.
So Bigelow somehow stuck it out to five o'clock, and then he went home. He took Bantha for her pre-bedtime walk at 8:30, when he was usually popping in his second DVD of the evening. He was under the covers by 9.