And I remember a uniformed officer of pronounced age who escorted me in and out of rooms with the gentleness of a nursemaid. He had the saddest eyes I had ever seen and forever had this look like he would one day walk out the front door and never come back.
I did a lot of talking over those two days but can’t recall much of anything that I said. They asked the same questions over and over again and even I grew tired of my answers and felt the urge to change it up just for the hell of it. If my responses failed to stop the repeated asking of the same questions then I assumed something was wrong with my answers. For a fleeting moment I even bandied about the notion of telling them that I was the one who held the knife and was ultimately the killer but self-survival kept me from making that mistake. Not that they would have believed me anyway.
With distance from the onslaught of interrogations it became clear that they weren’t interested in me. It was in the questions they asked and in the tone they asked them. They spoke to me like a child, half filling me in, half asking me to fill in the holes for them. All of their questions revolved around the “how” more than anything.
How did Valenti come to hire me to find his granddaughter?
How did I find out there were ransom notes?
How did the first payment happen?
They had Hector, but more importantly, they wanted the puppeteer manipulating the strings. They operated on the assumption that every murder follows a logical path, and this one followed a winding little road back to the old man himself. Tala’s murder, and perhaps even Morgan’s, were part of some conspiracy. Perhaps the murders weren’t pre-planned but they were certainly deliberate. And I was just the rube they used along the way when it helped their cause.
After some time, a suited man appeared in more and more discussions and seemed to be on my side. He was introduced as my lawyer though I didn’t recognize the face and was certain we had never met. But he clearly wanted to help me and for that I was grateful. I came to rely on his presence so much that when he left the room I had this instinct to run after him, lest he leave me behind and never come back. But he always came back.
On his last visit he led me through a maze of hallways and forms and ultimately deposited me into a parking lot where I was greeted by damp night air and the hum of air conditioning units.
Claire was there to give me a ride home. I didn’t know where my car was — impounded in a lot somewhere — and I didn’t have the energy or the sense to find it. We drove through the near-empty streets out of downtown and unwittingly passed the Cornfields park that began this nightmare. Not that I really noticed or cared. I was exhausted and felt detached from everything around me. I could smell the new-car leather and feel the gentle heat of the seat warmers but it didn’t seem like I was actually there in the passenger seat with Claire as the city went by.
We stopped at an all-night donut shop in Highland Park. It was expectedly empty at three in the morning. The lone worker manning the shift no one wanted shot us an annoyed look that we were rudely intruding on the private world she occupied every night and every early morning.
We sat at a yellow Formica table in a booth by the window under the garish glow of fluorescent lights. We drank scorched coffee, and I forced myself to eat a fritter just to have something in my stomach. As the crappy coffee took its effect and the rhythmic ticking of the lights overhead provided a beat that I could fall in line with, I slowly started to feel okay again. I found myself listening to the subtle sounds of Claire drinking coffee, her bracelet rattling on the table top as she placed the cup back down. It felt good to be near her. But there was a vague emptiness about the entire thing. And my mind kept coming back to this lingering question that I had no intention of asking but felt compelled to anyway.
“Why didn’t we have kids?”
Poor Claire gave her best shot at a reason but it was clear that she didn’t have the answer either.
THE INTERVIEW
The job to lead the department was out of reach before the first interview even started. Because of the nature of our industry, the firm required associates to hold to strict standards of conduct in their lives outside the office. That didn’t mean one couldn’t cheat on his wife or screw a friend out of money. Those were considered private issues no matter how public they often became. The firm was more interested in official legal issues, such as DUI, urinating in public, or getting arrested for manslaughter and conspiracy charges in a botched blackmailing scheme.
For a firm that was intrinsically risk-averse and for a job whose sole purpose was to keep the company from being sued, the idea that they would choose someone with so many questions around him was a dim option.
I knew Paul would make sure he brought my extracurricular activities to the attention of the key decision-makers in the hiring process. He wouldn’t do it in such a straightforward way as, “Did you hear about Chuck?” No, he would find some back-door method like sending out a memo requesting any updates to the Code of Conduct Handbook or promoting a new study on recidivism of persons who have committed misdemeanors.
The idea of reporting to Paul made me shudder, and I let myself drift off with the daydream of quitting before it became official, but deep down inside I knew I wouldn’t do that. I had it too good to be throwing it all away because I didn’t like guys with ponytails.
I still had to go through the motions of the interview for a job I never wanted and now had zero chance of getting. But despite all of that, I wasn’t ready to roll over. Perhaps it was all of the unfinished business of recent events that increased my desire to see something through to its end. Or maybe it was just that I despised Pat so much that I wanted to make his decision to deny me the role as difficult as possible. Either way, I wasn’t going down easy.
The first round was with the recruiting representative from HR. And although I was four times her senior in the same department, protocol dictated that she kick off the interview slate. She showed up in a tailored business suit that looked new. I smiled internally at the act because in many ways this was more an interview for her with the future lead of the department than it was for me as the potential future head. She needed to make a good impression and thus was more nervous than I was. I helped guide her through the standard slate of questions and we got into a nice rhythm. It felt good to loosen up a bit on questions straight out of the manual I helped pen.
“Tell me about a time when one of your ideas was not adopted and how did you react?” was the question to probe on overcoming adversity.
“If you had to change one thing over the last five years in your career, what would it be?” was a way to get insight on someone’s self-reflection tendencies.
My preparation for this portion of the interview was to drop key words from the job description in each of my responses.
“…foster a collaborative environment…build integrated capabilities…nurture cross-functionality between groups…”
The poor thing literally made check marks on her paper each time I used one of these phrases. By the end of it she was almost ready to shout, “You’re hired!” I thanked her for her time and then commended her on a very well-run interview.
I didn’t let this cream-puff session lull me into complacency. The interviews that remained would get successively more difficult and less predictable as I went through the day.
We transitioned out of the gobbledygook of HR into the business world with its own set of fabricated jargon. The important thing to remember was that the interview was not about me. The interview was all about the person asking the questions. If you could unlock them and answer accordingly then your chances of getting hired were greatly increased.