Excerpt from Evil Genius by Claire Oshetsky, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Our work life was so regimented that we needed to find drama elsewhere, in our off-hours.

Here is the drama Randall Smiley found. He was carrying on with Vivienne Bianco.



Vivienne worked at the phone company, too, but she was four steps up the corporate ladder from Randall and me. Sometimes she wore a yellow suit to work. Sometimes a navy one. No matter what the color of her suit, her blouse was always tastefully cream-colored. She had the typical rigid stern posture that all career women of that era adopted. Solid shoes. Big bows. Beyond sharing an elevator with her now and then—I worked on the third floor, and she, the sixth—I didn't know Vivienne Bianco. None of us knew her. She was literally on another level from us Resident Billing workers, and for the life of us we couldn't understand why she'd chosen Randall Smiley, of all people, to be her love nest companion, because Randall was shaped like a beach ball with legs sticking out below and his hair was unwashed. Randall had lovely strong hands, though, and he spoke in a manly and commanding voice. His was the kind of voice you could imagine coming out of the mouths of four-star generals or sea captains. And maybe Randall had other fine qualities, too, not to be perceived in the course of daily polite society, and maybe he felt like a safe bet to her, because for sure she'd never run across him accidentally at one of her fancy corporate soirees or at a neighborhood bridge party. She and Randall moved in different circles. All these speculations kept us billing operators busy gossiping about Vivienne and Randall on our breaks, and we could never agree on what had brought those lovers together, because the ways of love are meandering and mysterious.

The two of them used to go to her place in Pacific Heights.

One day her husband came home at an inopportune time.

"Get under the bed, get under the bed!" Vivienne ugly-whispered, and Randall had done exactly that, squeezing himself under the bed—but in their panic the two lovers forgot to attend to the used condom on the floor. Talk about incriminating evidence. The rest of us could only imagine Randall's sickening embarrassment at needing to testify at the trial.

But wait. I'm telling it all wrong. It's because of the paddle situation.

Let me try again.



Because of the paddle situation it was nearly impossible to get the floor supervisors to excuse me at the same time that Randall took his break. That's why, for the last four days—ever since Vivienne had met her grisly end, that is—I'd only heard the story in bits and dribs of secondhand gossip. Everyone was frantically trying to hold up their paddles at the same time Randall held up his paddle for his break. All of us wanted to hear the story from Randall's own lips. But only four of us were allowed to unplug from the call queue at any one time. Otherwise the queue would spill into the day after next. Customers would be hanging on the line for so long that they'd wander away from their telephones or hang up and call again, which created an awful mess by the end of the day.

Despite these obstacles, eventually I found myself sitting in the designated break room for smokers, with Randall Smiley sitting across from me, telling his tale to us eager listeners. There were people from every floor crammed in. People had ignored the break rooms on their own floors and had come to the third floor on the off chance that their break would coincide with Randall's. There we were, we lucky few, huddled around a sticky square table with nothing on it but overflowing ashtrays. The story Randall told us that day begins with two lovers dreamily dozing in Vivienne's big bed in Pacific Heights. It's love. It's really love. Randall kept telling us eager listeners it was really love.

Suddenly Vivienne hears a key rattling in the lock on the front door downstairs and she ugly-whispers, "Dear Lord, it's Gene! Hide, Randall, hide!" And Randall, being a phone company man with no imagination, dives under the bed. He hears heavy shoes on the stairs. The sound is coming closer, step by step—imagine Randall telling this part of the story like the campfire story kids used to tell each other, at summer camp: Mary, I'm on the first step; Mary, I'm on the second step—and his heart won't stop its fearful clatter.

Excerpted from Evil Genius by Claire Oshetsky. Copyright © 2026 by Claire Oshetsky. Excerpted by permission of Ecco. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.