Page 100 - Labelle Gramercy, On the Case

Overtime

“Bendan’s not here. He has appointments later in the morning, so
I don’t know when he can see you, Powell.”
She obviously carried a large chip on her shoulder, and Labelle
Gramercy was just the person to knock it off. In other circumstances
I might have enjoyed these fair-sex confrontations, as might a refined
and dignified spectator at a female mud-wrestling match. Not now. I
could only hope the detective was savvy enough to keep this
antagonist below the boiling point.
Labelle calmly introduced herself as an officer of the law, avoiding
mention of Beau. Viewing Ms. Storry’s tight fury, I recalled an
incident certain to be in the files the policewoman had copied into
her laptop computer. Beau, despite an unknown number of ex-wives
and children in other cities, seemed bent on using his position to
seduce as many of the younger women in the office as possible. I
only knew about those who had left the company after such an
encounter, unwilling to lodge any serious—that is, criminal—
complaint: such was the price of getting a good recommendation
from TimeWarper to aid in securing their next job. Vin Kates, old
enough to be Lynn’s father, had observed Bendan’s boozy bonhomie
and attempted to warn her soon after she had been hired, about a
year ago. She had felt patronized, perhaps finding something ulterior
in his approach, and had told him off. Kates, already embroiled in
office intrigues, must have worried about the possibility of Lynn
complaining of harassment, so his next move was to pre-empt her by
coming to HR and insisting upon the insertion of his own version of
events in his personnel file. As she never did register any complaint, I
simply ignored it in the interest of keeping Kates around at least until
the end of his project; then some of the people on it inevitably would
leave, and I did not personally and could not professionally care
whom.
Maud Lynn’s protectiveness in the face of officialdom spoke
volumes about her relationship with the absent VP. But could that
hyper-reactive stance extend to eliminating an irritatingly judgmental
but ultimately harmless pest like Kates? In the hothouse atmosphere
of a sterile office building strange obsessions could bloom beneath
the fluorescent tubes. Enlightened HR doctrine, nudged into the
present by highly-paid consultants from academia, encouraged team-
building and the ever-elusive phenomenon of “communication”

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