Page 91 - Labelle Gramercy, On the Case

Overtime

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I locked the closet door. Labelle’s next stop was Vincent Kates’s
desk. A few flowers had already been deposited in corners of the
cubicle, liberated perhaps from the lobby. The chances of our being
unobserved were nil. Someone was sitting in the decedent’s chair,
doing something with the computer, his back to us. This seemed
disrespectful, somehow, as if the dead man’s field should be left
fallow for a suitable period of mourning. But work had to go on,
especially Y2K work. I recognized the man: Hardin—R. Terry
Hardin, per the name tag slotted into the bracket on the cubicle
partition a few feet down the hall. He was assigned to the same
project as Kates. Perfectly reasonable for him to be poking into his
coworker’s files. Wasn’t it?
I cleared my throat. “Terry.” I had no love for the childish
conventions of casualness pervading offices everywhere, but no
choice other than to adopt them—along with the political correctness
grudgingly accepted by what was left of the increasingly beleaguered
white male Anglo-Saxon management in corporate America. The
workforce, thanks to immigration and civil rights enforcement, had
become diverse, and affronts to that diversity resulted in lawsuits—
real pain that HR was supposed to prevent. That boiled down in
practice to eliminating eccentricity—no sexual harassment or the hint
of it, no ethnic jokes, nothing that could possibly give offense to
anybody—and a virtual infantilization of office workers, including a
studied informality in speech, dress and manner, all in lockstep with
lowest-common-denominator dumbed-down televised cultural
norms. Had I said, ‘Mister Hardin,’ it would have been considered a
patronizing provocation rather than adherence to a civilized norm of
adult behavior in a civil society.
Unstealthy though our approach had been, Hardin twitched and
the screen image instantly flipped to an innocuous TimeWarper press
release I had broadcast a week earlier. He turned and glared at us, a
passive-aggressive introvert caught in some minor transgression. His
watery eyes bugged through thick glasses at each of us in turn.
“Eh? Oh, it’s you, Powell. Good. I can’t get past Vinnie’s stupid
password protection on his project files. I thought I knew all the
codes he kept using over and over—supermodel names from the

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