From A DEATH A DAY

Copyright 2001 by Rhonda Keith

Chapter 1

Roxy Barbarino examined the gun minutely with her eyes and fingers before holding it to her temple. She peered down the barrel, absorbed the smooth feel of the steel, tried to discern a pattern in the rough horn handle. She even smelled it. She had already practiced aiming by using a mirror to find the correct angle to hold it against her head. She'd heard of people aiming badly and ending up blind or paralyzed. She wanted this to be a clean shot ­ as clean as it could be, considering the mess she'd leave on her desk. She took a deep breath, steadied the muzzle against her head, and fired.

Quietly chanting "ow," Roxy opened her eyes and sighed, her Thursday morning meditation complete. Her young head was still intact. She had thick, wavy black hair framing a pretty face: olive skin, big brown eyes, thick eyebrows and lashes, a strong nose, and full lips pulled into a faintly sardonic expression by an imperfectly corrected harelip.

It took her a death a day to get through eight hours at the office. Her own death was a rarity. Usually people in the company died, but often she dealt with a politician, or a CEO who'd just done hundreds or thousands of people out of jobs, or some other jerkoid in the news. A five or ten-minute suicide or murder scenario cleared her head and gave her some perspective on the lesser murders committed daily on truth, on dignity, on good times at MassInterfaceInc. Or MassInterment, as Jim Rainbolt called it. Or sometimes MassInternment. Roxy saw the name "MassInterfaceInc" as a prime example of teutonic corruption of the integrity of discrete words theoretically so loved by - face it - PR people like herself. She had been spoiled by an undergraduate study of literature.

MIFI was a public relations outfit that had grown like kudzu throughout the country. Roxy had an entry-level copywriting job, her first career-path job out of college. She was beginning to wonder if she was fit for survival if it meant a lifetime of boredom and terror ­ hers, and, she was certain, nearly everyone else's at MIFI ­ worn with the same kind of smile required at L. Bo Bender's Nitery, where she had worked as a student, as a change from working at her dad's restaurant.

Here at MIFI no one actually said to her, "Smile, honey! Why arncha smiling? What's wrong? How bouta smile?" as they had at L. Bo's whenever she was wearing her normal, neutral, working face. She had always thought they should feel lucky she wasn't frothing at the mouth and plowing dull steak knives into their throats. Years of working as the boss's daughter in her dad's restaurant had not transformed her into the waitress ideal. She took more after her mother's side of the family, sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued hillbillies, rather than her dad's sunny Italian geniality.

But at MIFI the smile was not demanded; rather it was presented as a daily example of The Good to which all should aspire.

Roxy had decided to cut down on her daily crap quota by never talking when she could write, and never writing if she could avoid contact altogether with select co-workers - MIFI called everyone team workers but as far as Roxy could see, everyone was her boss. But yesterday she had been forced to actually talk to Vern, head smiler and executive project director of her department, about the Up With You! account, a promotion package they were designing for a motivational consultant, because Vern hadn't answered her last three memos and two phone messages.

"I want to keep the lines of communication open!" Vern boomed at staff meetings in his nervous but resonant voice, suggestive of warmth, camaraderie, wisdom, humor, and all sorts of other traits he did not in fact possess; he'd earned that voice from years of heavy smoking. "Tell me what's on your mind."

But any time Roxy tried to tell him what was on her mind, Vern had been most sympathetic and understanding and nothing ever resulted from their little chats. However, she couldn't avoid yesterday's little chat.

"Vern, I've been trying to wrap up the taping for Up With You!, but the guys at the studio haven't answered my messages, and people are giving me different due dates, like they've been talking to the client or the studio, but no has told me if the due dates are changed. I can't get appointments with anyone, I can't even get anyone on the phone."

"Oh, yeah, Roxy, I got your memo. Well, we decided to take a different tack on that ..." He shuffled through some papers on his desk and pulled some out. "We came up with this." He handed her a script.

Roxy glanced at it. It was an entirely different script from the one she'd written and started to tape in the studio. "If I'm not going to work with you on rewriting it ­ well, obviously it's already been done ­ " She flushed, which made the scar on her lip more conspicuous. "I guess it's not necessary for me to read this. What I need to know is, should I cancel the appointment I had for the taping tomorrow morning?"

"Uh, yes, yes. I apologize, I just forgot to mention it." He smiled all the while, a benevolent uncle chortling at a heart-warming human foible. "Isn't that always the way, there's never any communication in a communications office, ha ha. The cobbler's children, you know."

Roxy was torn between humiliation and fear of losing what was left of her job, but quickly shifted into plain hate, to which she was better suited temperamentally. She had been hired a year before by a very nice man who encouraged her, taught her a lot, and made her work hard. Seven months later, he left for another company, and since Vern had replaced him, she was discouraged, told nothing, and given very little to do. She didn't know why. She had started looking for another job, but how would it look if she couldn't give her present boss as a reference? She didn't know enough about this kind of working world to understand whether it would matter very much or not. Her dad's restaurant had not been training for this kind of environment. Maybe they would give her a good reference just to get rid of her. She would like to have talked to her parents about it, but she didn't want them to think she was failing already after having been an academic star for so many years. Anyway, they had almost always been self-employed and had a different slant on work. Her mother's part-time teaching at the University of Akron did not require major political affiliations within her college. Of course, her mom had never stepped up to full-time.

Maybe I should go to graduate school, Roxy thought.

Thursday afternoon, after doing what little work she had on her desk and eating more doughnuts than she enjoyed, Roxy composed an imaginative, colorful, highly insulting obituary about Vern. With her desktop publishing software, she was putting together a little newsletter for her own pleasure consisting entirely of murder reports and death notices of her own creation. Tomorrow's meditation would be a major production. Perhaps she should make it a double death and have his wife Anne join him. She contemplated their joint vileness.

Vern was supposedly writing a novel about Camelot; he loved "all things Arthurian," as he put it. He painted miniature shields with the heraldic symbols of their family names for everyone in the company, then mounted them on foam board and stuck them on the wall in his office. He did the research, they were authentic, colorful, and neatly done, and were steadily filling up his wall.

Even the black employees were honored with the coat of arms of their forebears' owners. One of them, Wilson Conway, had his blown up in camera (Jim Rainbolt's work), backed it with foam board and attached a handle, and came to work carrying it as a life-size shield. But instead of European arms, he carried a spear and wore an African head-dress. He had a rubber Halloween full-head mask, Caucasian, suspended from the point of the spear.

"Hey, man, Excalibur!" he shouted one day, leaping into Vern's office. Vern smiled thinly. Wilson was a graphic designer; he could get away with things like that. Vern continued making his shields, and in fairness, Roxy thought, how could he exclude anyone? And Wilson could possibly have had European ancestors too. Vern just hadn't thought it through.

Vern's wife Anne had run a little business called It's To Di For, a boutique that sold copies of Princess Di's outfits. She went into a crisis when the princess was killed. She had to close down and still hadn't come up with a new idea.

Roxy thought of them as Lord and Lady Twit, or sometimes Lord Twit and Lady Twat. They both deserved an early death.

The worst thing about Vern's arrival at MIFI was that it led to the loss of an office friend, a woman Roxy had been inclined to think of as a mentor. She'd heard about mentors in college. Like Vern, Sandra had worked on a newspaper before coming to MIFI.

"You know, Roxy, we used to look down on public relations writers," Sandra had confided once over coffee. "And now I are one." She laughed ruefully. "But the money's a lot better."

Roxy's own training at the University of Akron had been a mix of journalism and literature, with a splash of advertising and "communications." The professors of the older schools of journalism and literature professed not to understand what was meant by "communications."

"Is it public speaking? Electronic equipment? Sign language? Perhaps Esperanto?" Professor Weathers used to ask contemptuously. "Hmph." His harrumphs were as communicative as anything Roxy had ever heard. "They need to get themselves a subject matter."

Despite her job description and training and seven good months pre-Vern, Vern chose to view Roxy as an over-qualified gofer, and as the wind shifted, so shifted Sandra.

Roxy decided that Sandra seemed to be chiefly motivated by fear. Although she and her husband both had held well paying jobs for years, she seemed always afraid of losing what she had. But in fact Roxy felt that most of MIFI's employees were afraid of losing their jobs. MIFI merged and was merged with so often that it seemed as if the goal of the executives was to create the biggest company in the world, maybe just one great big one, with the fewest possible employees. The high paid execs would make decisions about mergers and play golf together, and maybe a dozen or so people would do the work. Sandra had made that one giant leap for womankind, from worker to exec, and was feeling shakier than ever, not truly one of the guys.

"It's not that anyone really believes that every white male from the beginning of time advanced only on his own merits, like they weren't all watching their backs all the time," she had said to Roxy once over coffee, when they still had coffee together. "But if I use the new politics to my own advantage, or if Wilson Conway uses it, suddenly they develop an excruciatingly keen sense of fair play."

Fear had seeped into every aspect of Sandra's professional existence. She was afraid of dressing too colorfully, and afraid of not being fashionable enough; afraid of looking too feminine or too masculine. She felt, however, that by dressing only in natural fibers she maintained her '60s hippy values. She worried that her office was either too sterile or too frivolous. She hung up a mobile she'd made, ceramic doves suspended by fishing line from a ceramic rainbow. It made a light tinkling sound when the wind blew through the window. (MIFI had innovative environmental-access windows: they opened and closed.) But she took it down and filed it after Vern came. She was afraid of being too social at work, and afraid of looking like a loner, but most afraid of being friendly with the wrong people. She was afraid of appearing to slack off by arriving too late or leaving too early, and of not being able to get her work done by five. She was afraid of not showing initiative, and afraid someone wouldn't like her ideas, and afraid someone would steal them.

Sandra didn't like Vern any better than Roxy did, because he was idle and smoked up the offices with his newly fashionable cigars and had at first refused to buy them new computers. He wanted everyone to use Macintoshes, because he already knew how to use them. Sandra explained they had to be compatible with the in-house print shop, which could only read IBM-type disks, and besides the Windows software was as easy to use as the Macs, but it took months to convince him and prevent a disaster with the print shop. This was the only point on which Roxy had observed Sandra to be firm. Maybe it was agreeing with Sandra about the computers that had made Vern mad at Roxy. Sandra was still in his good book, though.

"He won't even buy new type balls for the Selectrics," Sandra complained. "He comes in and steals mine because he likes the typeface. He probably uses them as armor where it counts most. Sir Vern of the Pica Balls."

"More likely the Elite balls," Roxy said.

They had both laughed.

That had been weeks ago. Roxy was going to plan Sandra's death, when she was intercepted by the real dead man who was found in the men's room down the hall.

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