Page 78 - Labelle Gramercy, On the Case

Overtime

plan for damage control. A memo to the staff had to be composed;
managers, executives and next-of-kin notified; state and federal
statutes reviewed; and my assistant Leah Rackette put into the picture
so she could start the ball rolling up the side of a brand-new
mountain of paperwork.
She was in her condo Sunday morning, as usual—an easy target
for weekend business calls like mine. Did she sit by the phone
waiting for one of her few surviving acquaintances to make contact?
It was Leah who began to get me worried when she casually
mentioned, in the course of discussing what to do with the mess left
behind by Vincent D. Kates, that something else odd had occurred
since I left the building Friday afternoon about four o’clock to play
my usual game of squash at the health club.
“So it looks like we’ll have to fill two positions, now.”
“Two?” For a moment I thought another body had been found in
the building.
I couldn’t see her face, obviously, but I knew that Leah was
scowling, an expression she assumed so frequently as to render it
meaningless. She had the old-timer’s trait of denigrating any younger
employee’s lack of knowledge—even though she herself was no
longer a reliable source of institutional memory.
“One of the guards quit suddenly Friday afternoon. I put the
forms on your desk, but you had already left for the day.”
“Oh. That shouldn’t be a problem. We want to outsource security,
anyway. I’ll call Cerberus when I get into the office Monday morning.
They’ll be glad to get their big flat feet even farther in the door. Was
it anybody we knew?”
My question had no real motive behind it. Guards, like the
maintenance crew and the mail room staff, were not white-collar
workers and required no exit interview or severance pay when they
terminated of their own accord; processing was cut-and-dry.
“It was that short guy with a missing front tooth. Ponce was his
name, D. Leon Ponce. He turned in his ID badge, his keys and a
forwarding address for his last check to his supervisor at the end of
the shift. I took him out of active status on the computer
immediately.”
“Good.”

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