The Temporary Detective

Chapter 3

A nasal snicker from across the way stemmed her wave of self-pity. Isobel looked up to see an unattractive, overweight woman with a squarish face settling her paisley-clad bulk at the opposite desk.

"You can let them go to voice mail, you know."

"What about these?" Isobel indicated the blinking lights.

The woman rolled her eyes. "Those you gotta answer."

Isobel dug deeper in her bag and produced a handful of wrinkled receipts. One by one she picked up the holding lines and scribbled down the messages. Two more calls came in, but she let them go to voice mail. Finally, it was quiet.

"You must be the temp," the woman's grating tones intruded. "I'm Doreen Fink. I'm sure we'll be very good friends," she added with a wink that made Isobel flinch.

"I took a few...several...okay, a lot of messages," Isobel said. "One was a woman for Frank, but she didn't identify herself."

"Frank is Mr. Lusardi, and if she didn't say, then it was his wife. Did she sound like a b***h?" Doreen spat. Isobel nodded. "Then it was her." Except that in Doreen's thick Brooklyn accent, it sounded more like "huh."

A pudgy, downcast man with a shock of thick brown hair appeared at Doreen's side and held out a sheet of yellow legal paper.

"Could you...?" His high, timid voice trailed off.

Doreen pointed to Isobel. "Give it to huh," she said. "I got enough to do."

The man cleared his throat. "Can you type this for me?"

"Sure," Isobel said, relieved to have a job she could handle. She glanced at the letter and the signature jogged her memory. Stan Henderson. The very first call.

"I took a message for you from..." She racked her brain. "Lou Volpe!" She yelled the name as if she'd just discovered a winning lottery ticket.

"Oh," Stan said dully. "What's his number?"

Isobel's heart sank. "I'm sorry. He didn't leave one."

Stan's doughy face drooped even further, and he trundled away. Isobel set his letter aside and started shuffling through her receipts, trying to decipher her scrawls. A thick pad of message notes in triplicate landed with a thump, inches from her nose, and she jumped.

"You need one of these," Doreen said, looming over her. Up close, Isobel could see that her chin was dotted with dark spots, either failed electrolysis or a bad case of blackheads, and her breath smelled like garlic.

Who eats garlic first thing in the morning? Isobel wondered.

"Um, thanks," she said, leaning away from Doreen.

"Conchita is Stan and Paula's assistant, but she won't be in until noon today, so you gotta cover for her until she gets back. I'll take care of Frank's phones and stuff."

"Okay."

"And no personal calls." A lascivious smile bent the corners of Doreen's mouth. "Unless we get to hear about how good it was last night. You got a boyfriend?"

"No."

"Too bad. Last temp we had, she had this guy who liked to do her every morning before work in the bathroom of a different Starbucks," Doreen said, practically salivating at the thought. "Then they'd talk about it on the phone all day."

Isobel moved her Starbucks cup to the other side of the desk. She needed to find something to do. Immediately.

The phones were still quiet, so she picked up Stan's letter. Then she remembered James. She shuddered involuntarily, thinking about how unprofessionally she'd handled his call. But she had promised to check in. Maybe if she altered her voice a little, he'd think he had reached someone else earlier.

"Temp Zone, James Cooke speaking."

"Hello, James," she said, trying to keep her voice high and light. "It's Isobel. I'm at InterBank Switzerland and everything's fine."

"What's wrong with you? Sounds like you've been inhaling helium."

Isobel readjusted her voice. "Nothing. I just swallowed funny."

"You didn't check in. I tried you before, but the receptionist must have transferred me to the wrong number. What's your direct line?"

Isobel looked down at the phone. All she saw were four digits: 6583. Her eyes flew to a sheet pinned to the corkboard on the wall, listing employee names and four-digit extensions. She looked frantically around for some indication of the exchange, but she couldn't find one. Doreen was nowhere to be seen.

"Can you hang on a sec?" Without waiting for an answer, she dropped the phone on the desk, where it landed with a clatter. She sprinted down the corridor and almost collided with the bearded man.

"What's the telephone exchange here?"

"212."

"No, not the area code, the first three numbers."

"What do you mean? We all just got extensions."

Isobel exhaled in frustration. "If somebody calls you directly from the outside, what do they dial?"

The man looked at her impatiently. "212-441-"

Isobel ran the length of the floor back to her desk.

"212-441-6583," she said finally to James, who could have interviewed and hired several new temps in the time he'd been waiting.

"That's odd. I could have sworn that's what the receptionist said."

Isobel giggled nervously. "Really? Well, you know, sometimes wires get crossed."

"Yeah, but it sounded like you."

"Oh, here comes the boss! Gotta run. Call you later!" She hung up, cursing herself for being so unprepared. Isobel knew she wasn't fooling James. She gave a defeated sigh; there was only so much she could do. She fired up the computer and, in between calls, examined Stan's letter.

It was riddled with bad grammar, which presented her with a moral dilemma. Should she correct it? She considered asking Doreen, who had reappeared. But after overhearing her on the phone, exclaiming, "You think I screwed you in the back?" Isobel determined that the difficulty presented by "between he and I" would be lost on her.

"Hey! Who are you?"

An attractive, slender woman with auburn, boy-short hair was depositing a bulging tote bag on the third desk.

"Isobel Spice. I'm temping."

"Nikki Francis. Nice to meet you. I don't suppose anyone called for me?"

"No. Wait! A man called, but he didn't leave a message. I said you were in the staff meeting. He seemed surprised."

Nikki laughed. "I'm sure he was. I do the department billing, part-time. I'm really an actress."

"Me, too!"

Across the room, Doreen gave a loud snort. "Another one? Jeez, this town is crawling with youse. If you're all so good, whaddaya doin' here?"

Nikki turned her back on Doreen. "Ignore her. She's a cretin."

Isobel felt her stomach unclench for the first time all morning. "Can I ask your advice?" she whispered. Nikki nodded. "Stan Henderson's memo is full of grammatical errors. Should I correct them?"

"Go ahead. He'll never know the difference. Just don't change the meaning."

Isobel gave her a grateful smile and went back to work.

The morning passed surprisingly slowly after the initial flurry, and Isobel puttered back and forth between her desk and the small area around the corner where Frank, Stan and Paula had their offices, delivering letters for signing. She was eager to talk to Nikki some more, but whenever she attempted to start a conversation, Doreen would leer at them and say, "If you two don't stop chitchatting, I'm gonna have to put youse over my knee!"

As one o'clock approached, Isobel's stomach was growling, and she had to pee like a racehorse. She hadn't been to the bathroom all morning, and the coffee had gone straight through her. She decided to push through and hit the ladies' room on her way out, so she tidied up the last few memos and checked her watch. It was a few minutes before one. She stood up. So did Doreen.

"I'm taking lunch," Doreen announced. "You take yours when I get back."

"I'm leaving," Isobel said. "I was only hired until one."

Doreen picked up the phone and punched some numbers. "Felice? We need the temp all day. She says she's only here 'til one." Doreen waited a moment, then called across to Isobel. "Can you stay?"

"Well, there's an audition I was hoping to go to-"

"She can stay," Doreen said and hung up. Before Isobel could respond, Doreen plunged on. "You can take lunch at two. I'm off to the ladies'." And with a swing of her elephantine behind, she was gone.

Nikki smiled sympathetically at Isobel. "I hate to tell you, but if it's an open call, you'll never get in now anyway. You have to get there first thing in the morning to get a time slot."

"Oh," Isobel said. Clearly, she still had a lot to learn-on all fronts.

"Doreen shouldn't have done that, though," Nikki went on. "It's not really up to her."

Isobel brightened. "On the other hand, it will make me look good to my temp agent. I'll call him."

But before she could pick up the phone, deafening alarm bells rent the air.

"What's that?" she screamed at Nikki, who was already grabbing her bag.

"Emergency drill!" Nikki shouted back. ""Get your stuff and follow me!"

Isobel felt her heart skip a beat. "Are you sure it's a drill?" she shouted.

"Blue light!"

Isobel looked up at the wall where Nikki was pointing. Underneath the whirling red emergency light was a smaller flashing blue one with the word "Drill" taped next to it.

As soon as Isobel started to run, she realized just how desperately she had to pee. She was halfway down Stairwell A to the sixteenth floor, when she realized there was no way she'd make it to the bottom. She watched Nikki and the suit jackets recede down the steps, then raced back upstairs through the door, which, thankfully, had been propped open.

As Isobel bolted down the corridor, it dawned on her that she didn't know where the bathroom was. She tried to recall which direction Doreen had taken, but the corridors, unfamiliar and interchangeable, refused to yield a door with a female icon. Isobel dead-ended at Stairwell B and doubled back as the alarm bells continued their raucous clanging. She sprinted past her desk, where the offending Starbucks cup mocked her from atop the phone message pad, and dashed around the corner. Finally, there it was-the ladies' room.

With renewed energy, Isobel pushed open the door and flew past the vestibule with its makeup desk and long mirror. She flung open the door to the first stall.

And screamed.