Cube Sleuth (12 page)

My dad’s smart, my brother’s smart, I’m smart. I had friends who got money for every good grade they got. My straight A’s earned me a pat on the shoulder and an expression on my parents’ faces that said “Doing what you’re capable of isn’t impressive. It’s expected.” My dad and one of his brothers got full academic scholarships to college. So did my brother. I put pressure on myself to live up to that and ended up getting two full rides.

I was always a mama’s boy, hiding behind her leg when company came over. At five years old, I was a skinny leprechaun of thirty-five pounds, and my mom could scoop me up and sit me on her lap. Even at twenty-seven, she still dreams of me that way. I’m Peter Pan in her mind.

My Italian grandmother had a blue and red kerchief that she wore on her head. The house I lived in as a child had an entryway with a beveled glass door that was about the size of a phone booth. I used to borrow her kerchief, run into the entryway as Clark Kent, close the door, and return as the Superman of my little row home on Emily St. When I was fourteen we moved into my grandmother’s house after she passed away; it’s less than two miles from that first house. My parents still live there.

* * *

By the time I climb the five steps to my parents’ front door, I want to take a nap. I walked less than two miles, but my calves burn and my chest stings from breathing so deeply. I called ahead to let my parents know I was dropping in and that I’d explain when I got there.

My parents always watch TV in their finished basement. When my mother hears me at the top of the steps saying, “It’s just me,” and I’m all out of breath, she asks what’s wrong in a panic. “Nothing. I’ll be down in a minute. I need a glass of water.”

I’m not one to drop by randomly. I have dinner with my parents every other Tuesday and see them for birthdays, holidays, births, and deaths. We get along really well and are almost friends at this point, but I usually keep to myself. When I lived at home, I spent most of the day locked in my bedroom. I check in every now and then—and by “I check in,” I mean my mother calls to make sure I’m not dead in my apartment, and I fill her in on my life at the moment. My nephew’s birth provided more reasons for family gatherings; that tiny prince instantly became the centerpiece of our lives.

I wash my face and head downstairs to lie to my parents. I love my parents very much, so I lie to them on a constant basis. I lie to protect them from the truth about me. Throughout my childhood, they lied to keep me happy and safe, and adulthood is my time to return the favor. I lie to keep them from worrying, especially my mother. If she knew the real me, she would lie awake every night thinking about her loser son with no friends sleeping with his dead friend’s true love, gambling himself into half-a-year’s-salary of debt, playing detective as an escape from playing Bobby Pinker.

My mother starts to fear that I died in my apartment and no one has smelled me yet if we go more than four days without talking. I suspect my dad is the same way and just keeps that thought to himself. That’s a level of love I never thought myself capable of until I held my nephew for the first time and my brain flooded with the very rational fears of choking, birth defects, crib death, kidnapping, leukemia, and King Herod coming back from the dead and decreeing that all infants under the age of one be slaughtered to snuff out a new messiah.

I had spent half of my walk creating excuses as to how and why I ended up at my parents’ door. Luckily, my parents
want
to believe whatever I tell them, so I don’t have to be very convincing in my fabrications.

I make up some cow chips about going to a concert with a guy from work, and he drove, and he had to leave in the middle of the show because his daughter got sick and he had to pick her up from a slumber party. My mom wants to know if the little girl is hospital sick or just regular sick. I assure her she’s just regular sick.

My dad tells me to join a gym so I won’t feel like dying after walking a mile and a half. He goes to the gym five days a week at five-thirty in the morning. If I’m awake at that hour, it’s because I haven’t gone to bed yet. If I didn’t know my dad had been an agnostic, sleep-till-noon college kid in the seventies, I’d seriously wonder if my real father was a sloven, apathetic mailman.

My mom asks about my yellow tracksuit. On the spot, I spit out “The band we went to see always asks their audience to wear specific outfits at their shows as a gag so they can spot their true fans.” Sometimes my own lies impress me.

She then asks in a hushed tone how I’ve been coping with Ron’s death.

“I’ve been reading books to keep my mind off of things.”

“How’s my Nancy?”

“Good. We’re good.” I really need to get around to telling my parents Nancy dumped me.

“Tell her I wore some of her jewelry at work and some of the girls want to buy stuff from her.”

I nod.

Mom asks if I’ve thought about doing stand-up comedy on my own so I can get back onstage. I explain that stand-up isn’t my thing. She says I can do monologues. I tell her I don’t write my own stuff and refuse to do any of Ron’s stuff without him.

She asks me about every major aspect of my life, and I answer honestly whenever I can, which isn’t often. I’m much more honest in better times.

She asks if I’m eating fruit every day. If I own enough underwear and socks. If I eat too much fast food. If I know my neighbors. If I play the guitar after nine on weeknights. Annoying questions, but I can answer all of them honestly. Well, except the guitar question. I stop playing at ten, but I tell her I stop at nine.

Then I get the report on the family. My mom talks and talks. My dad only talks when she asks him for a detail, usually a date. My dad has a brain full of birthdates and death dates, marriage dates, the year this happened, the year that show went off the air. My mother fills me in on who has cancer, who’s in remission, who’s on chemo, who had a stroke, who had a recent colonoscopy, who lost their father.

After family, she moves on to family friends. Some of the information is relevant and/or interesting, but I’ve forgotten most of it by the time Joe shows up to take me home.

* * *

Joe and I drive up the steep incline of the Platt Bridge on our way to 95 South. Joe wears an Eagles Jersey and matching cap; he sells airtime for WIP, the local sports radio station. His SUV has heated leather seats and separate climate controls for the driver’s seat and the front passenger seat. “I’m thinking you shouldn’t have said that to her until you got back to your place. Can’t believe she left you there.”

I shrug. “It’s my fault. I humiliated her in public, even if no one knew it.”

Joe’s cell phone rings and he taps the blue tooth on his ear. “Yeah…I know…definitely before he falls asleep…no, I—we can talk about this all night if you want, let me talk to my brother now…I will. Bye.

“Holly says hi. So, I still don’t get why you were Russian tourists.”

“Because Ron was weird. That was his idea of a fun first date. And Helen’s. It would’ve been fun for me, too, if I hadn’t been thinking about how she was probably pretending I was Ron all night.”

“You should’ve stuck with Nancy. Gonna be hard to find another girl who treats you that way, that we all like,
and
is good looking.” This is as preachy as Joe gets with me. He has a paper-perfect life—great job, pretty wife, healthy baby, nice house, two nice cars, no debt—and has plenty of things he could pick on in my quickly-heading-nowhere life. But he never does. He never holds me up to his standards, and neither do my parents. I’m thankful for that. If they treated me like the fuck-up I actually am, I’d have ended up as a Goth kid taking breaks from Dance-Dance-Revolution to cut myself. I get away with murder because I’m different. As the only artistic one in the family, they don’t “get” me, so they accept me on my own terms.

I haven’t told Joe about my poker debt. I can trust him with most secrets, but can’t expect him to keep that one from my parents.

I nod to his comment on Nancy. “Joe, you didn’t tell Mommy or Daddy about Nancy, did you?”

“Not yet. But it’s hard not to slip. You gotta tell them.”

“It’s gonna kill them. They’ve already married us off in their heads.”

“Well, when she never comes to another family party ever, they’re gonna catch on.” Joe taps my knee with his fist twice to say “suck it up and get it done.”

“How’s my godson?”

“Great. He’s great. Learning to roll over by himself now.”

“I gotta come see him soon.”

“Actually, I need you to babysit for us in a few weeks. The ninth. Check your calendar.”

“Just me? Alone? I don’t think I can.”

“He’s a baby, not a nuclear reactor. He barely moves. You’ll be fine.”

My mind races with thoughts of choking, sharp edges, fever, vomiting, dropping him, a tree crashing through the window and crushing him, a vampire swooping in to steal him for a midnight snack. “My calendar is clear, so I’m in. I’ll need some instruction, but I’m in.”

* * *

As my brother drives off, I walk toward my apartment complex hoping Helen will be waiting for me in the lobby, maybe crying, to apologize for trying to make me play Ron and then leaving me for dead.

The lobby is empty.

Walking up four flights of stairs because the building code violation that is the elevator is broken yet again, I hope to open my door and see a series of messages from Helen on my answering machine because she lost my cell phone number.

My answering machine is empty.

Since the lobby, the answering machine, and I, are all empty, I try to fill up with online poker and end up punishing myself for what I did to Helen, Ron, and Nancy.

I discover that no matter how many times I stare at the face of my cell phone or walk over to my answering machine, Helen won’t take the hint that I want her to call me.

After two days of waiting for Helen to call—not even to apologize, just to make sure I’m alive—all of my guilt over embarrassing her has melted and I’m just PO’ed. Fuck her. I could be dead in an alley somewhere, stabbed in every vital organ and gland. We don’t even have any common friends she could call to check up on me.

I start to draft an obituary:
Robert Domenic Pinker, mundane editor, sketch comedian, amateur detective, 27. Found dead in West Philadelphia with multiple stab wounds to his heart, liver, brain, kidneys, pituitary gland, thyroid…
I doubt there’s a lot of fact checking for the obits of Joe Nobody. As long as my check clears, it’ll show up in the paper. Helen will see it and lose her mind and shave her head and become a self-flagellating monk living on Mt. Sinai surviving solely on camel jerky and water.

Were it not for the fact that it would give my parents nightmares, I
would
put that obit in the paper.

Waiting for Helen to give a shit about whether I live or die makes time drag. After three days of taping everything Cody says in his cube, the only things I’ve learned is that he hasn’t spoken to his father since graduating college and that he takes Lipitor for cholesterol.

* * *

One of my most juvenile methods of killing time at work is to open an article and change every instance of the letter
p
with the word
poop
and every instance of the letter
c
with the word
cock
. It never gets old, and as long as I don’t save the changes, no harm done. In the middle of snickering about how the word
product
has been transformed into the much funnier word
pooproducockt
I feel the familiar jolt of a tiny blade against my jugular.

“I could’ve killed you.”

Maybe I’m paranoid because I’ve been spying on him, but Cody’s sleeper hold seems malicious today, the tip of his penknife threatening to break the soft pink skin of my neck. “You know every time you do this I get a throbbing erection, right?” I hope that appealing to Cody’s homophobia will get him to release me.

He takes the sleeper-hold arm away but keeps the penknife pressed to my throat. With his free hand, he places the voice-activated tape recorder on my desk.

I gulp, and the blade nicks me. “Um…what’s that?” I doubt he has any way of knowing it’s mine.

“Someone killed my friend Ron and I’m going to find him.” Cody’s impression of me is adolescently whiney.

Shit. I should have taped over that. “Sorry, man. I…I don’t know.”

“What the hell would make you think I killed Ron?” He finally lets go and sits on my desk facing me. “I liked that kid.” His hands on his head, Cody looks more confused than angry. But I’m still afraid.

“I didn’t really think you…you have guns…I can’t find anyone who…sorry.”

“I have a gun, so I killed him? Brilliant. Look, I get that you can’t accept his death, so you’re doing this fantasy thing. I get that. If I didn’t like you, if we weren’t buds, I could get you fired. So pull your head out of your ass before you do get fired. Or arrested. This aint
The Hardy Boys
, son. You invade the wrong guy’s privacy and you’ll end up with a knife in your back.”
Law and Order
,
Columbo
,
The Hardy Boys
. If someone compares me to Jessica Fletcher from
Murder, She Wrote
, I’ll die a happy man.

“Grow the hell up, Bobby. Go see the therapist. It’s already paid for. Take advantage of it.” He takes the tape recorder and strolls out of my cube. Over his shoulder, he says, “Thanks for the toy.”

Dabbing a napkin at the tiny cut on my neck, I decide I need to practice my surveillance techniques with an added emphasis on upping my stealth quotient. To be safe, I need to practice on someone who is completely oblivious. The kind of guy who doesn’t know he farted until he smells it. Luckily, such a man sits slouched in his chair just a few yards from me: Harry Brody.

Portrait parle for Harry Brody: male, Caucasian, gray hair in a ponytail, dark brown eyes, fifties, around five-foot-ten, probably 250 pounds. Most of that 250 pounds resides in the perfectly round belly that makes Harry look like he’s eleven months pregnant with a baby walrus. His ties never quite make it past the apex of his carb mound, and with white orthopedic extra-wide shoes, he looks like a circus clown trying to blend in as an office worker. You can see the edges of his ratty mustache when you’re behind him. He always keeps a chunk of change in his pocket, and you can hear him coming a mile away. He’s like Wyatt Earp, if people suspected Earp were mildly retarded.