Cube Sleuth (22 page)

I pop out of bed like a slice of bread in a slot toaster. So much to do, so little time. Actually, I have absolutely nothing to do, and all the time in the world.

I take a forty-minute shower, all soapy and warm and steamy. I eat a big brunch (I never wake up early enough for breakfast) and then go through all of the junk in my apartment that won’t be worth moving to my new place. I throw out four trash bags of crap and some old pieces of furniture.

I spend hours looking through apartment complexes online. The places that don’t look scary or identical to my current hell cost $200 more a month than the rent I no longer have to pay. I need to buckle down, pack more lunches, play less poker, and maybe do some freelance editing.

* * *

On Monday morning I pull into the Paine-Skidder underground lot in my rental car ten minutes early. I sit in my car and finish listening to the song playing on my CD player (“Transformer” by a new group called Gnarls Barkley that Nancy turned me on to) before going into the building.

As I pass Suzanne’s office, I catch her leaning forward in her chair, surprised to see me coming in early.

When you consistently lower someone’s expectations, you can impress them very easily with mediocrity.

I email HR and ask them to forward me an email they sent around about gym discounts, an email I had deleted without opening at the time. Between the higher rent in my near future and the fact that I don’t know if my insurance will cover what Theo did to my car, this is no time for unnecessary expenditures. But since I can’t walk up a flight of stairs without fear of passing out, this seems like a necessity. I need the structure and discipline.

* * *

“Could I move in at the end of the month?” I turn slowly, looking at what will soon be my new home.

“You can move in at the end of the week if you need to. They’ll pro-rate your rent.” The man showing me the apartment is a tenant who gets paid to show people properties in this particular complex.

My old apartment had wiring from the twenties and pipes from the fifties. This place has wiring from the seventies and appliances to match, including an electric oven set at eye level. I’ll have a dishwasher and free access to a pool. This is my Xanadu, the third apartment I’ve looked at, and there won’t be a fourth.

My old apartment was a converted studio. My new one is a true one-bedroom, with a short hallway separating the living room from the bedroom. The bathroom and kitchen lie on opposite sides of this hallway. So if Nancy moves in with me here, one of us can go into the bedroom, close the door, and feel some semblance of solitude.

Between the money I saved on rent and my security deposit from the old apartment, putting up first and last and a security deposit for the new place doesn’t completely wipe out my savings. They’re decimated, sure, but not nonexistent.

* * *

Three days later I have my annual review. For the fourth year in a row, I receive the Meets Expectations raise, which will make my new rent easier to handle.

When Suzanne tells me that I’m just in time to get my Five Years of Service Award, my first thought isn’t of suicide, surprisingly. That was the old Bobby. The new Bobby focuses on the accomplishment of having survived five years at a job I loathe without getting fired.

“I can’t believe I’ve been here that long. I’m getting old,” I tell her. It’s almost lunchtime, and Suzanne’s office is bathed in warm yellow sunlight.

Suzanne laughs. “How old are you? I can’t really ask you that, but whatever.”

“Twenty-seven.”

“You’re a toddler, Bobby. I’ve been here since… ” She covers her eyes with one hand, “I’ve been here since you were three years old.”

“No way! How old are
you
?” I would have guessed that Suzanne is in her early forties.

“I started working here right after high school. That’s all I’m gonna say. I got my degrees at night.”

This place is Suzanne’s high school sweetheart, and she’s been married to him for two decades. She has no idea if he’s good in bed because she has no frame of reference. Though this is my first job after college, I at least got to third base with a few internships, enough to know that Paine-Skidder is a piss-poor bedfellow. But that doesn’t matter so much the day they tack six percent onto your salary.

* * *

A woman named Marilyn calls me from her office on the second floor and asks me to stop down because she needs a favor. I’ve never met this woman before. I ask her where her office is before I hang up.

I find her nameplate:
Marilyn Gleichgewicht
. I try to pronounce her last name in my head and fail miserably.

“Come in,” she says before I have a chance to knock. “Close the door behind you.”

I have no idea what Marilyn’s job is or why I would be able to help her with it. Some corporate abstract art, all geometric and using the same palette of colors as beach motel paintings, hangs on each wall in her office. These pieces lack originality and thus anything that could offend anyone’s theology, ethnicity or cultural sensibilities, or make them even the slightest bit interesting.

Marilyn talks to me like we’re old friends. “Twenty years ago, when Paine-Skidder was still on Race Street, we’d have Christmas skits every year. Elaborate skits with costume changes, musical numbers, detailed sets. People used to leave meetings early to rehearse. This is back when the company allowed alcohol on the premises for occasions other than when the board of directors came.”

Back when the company was somewhat cool.

“When we did those skits, we were kids. Your age.” Marilyn Guggenheim winks, assuming I’ll be flattered or amused by at being called a kid. “But now those kids are the vice presidents. Even the prez was in them back then.

“Anyway, Dee Dee Satou is retiring. I’m in charge of her retirement party. Dee Dee always lamented that we stopped doing the skits. I want to do one for her, about her.

“I was in Toastmasters with Ron, and he told us you two were doing a sketch show together.”

Ah, so that’s why Marilyn Glockenspiel came to me. She is the first person who mentions Ron casually, and doesn’t try to whisper his name with reverence. I like that. “Ron wrote all of our skits. I was just an actor. I don’t write. No good at it.”

“I’m sure you know more about the process than the rest of us. I wrote a couple of them, but, like I said, twenty years back. Did you work on the skits at all with him?”

“We would workshop them together and I would ad-lib a line here and there. But really, he wrote them by himself. They just came out of his head nearly perfect. I don’t know how he did it.”

Marilyn Googlemaps folds her hands in front of her on the desk. “I think you’re the man for the job, Bob. I’ll beg if I have to.” Another wink. Why do people keep calling me Bob? “Dee Dee’s a Survivor fanatic, so we could do, maybe, a Survivor parody or something. I have all the background on Dee Dee you could ever need. Endless material. She’s a real character.”

“I’ll do it on one condition.” Now I wink.

“Name it.”

“I want to play Dee Dee in the skit.”

She laughs conspiratorially. “I think that’d be really funny. We’ll have room in the party budget to buy you a good wig and those glasses she wears.”

“I’ll need to talk to her so I can really get her impression down. I’ve barely ever talked to her.”

“I have a tape of her old Toastmaster’s speeches.”

“Who’s gonna be at this party?”

“Everyone. Everyone. Dozens of employees, foreign dignitaries, her family and friends.”

My smile broadens. I get to act like a jackass, in drag, in front of my supervisor, her boss, his boss, and so on, and they’re all going to clap when I’m done. A dream come true. A dream I never even knew I had.

* * *

Nancy gives me a second chance.

I move into my great new apartment, and the money from my old place and my raise allow me to afford it.

I get to spend time at work writing and rehearsing a skit.

When this many good things happen to me in a short time span, I always draw the same conclusion: I’m about to die.

I spend the next few days waiting to be hit by a bus. Crushed by a falling piano. Beaten to death by Theo with my own bat.

Despite surviving most of the week, I don’t let myself get comfortable. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, knowing it will have recently stepped in dog shit and will probably land on my forehead. I feel it in my bones the way people with arthritis know it’s going to rain.

When I go to the gym for the first time and have my free consultation with a trainer, I think this might be how I die, of a heart attack. Dying from trying to get healthy is just the kind of irony I would expect for my demise.

The trainer puts me on a treadmill to see just how bad a shape I’m in. I
feel
like I’m about to die; my lungs tight and stuck to my ribs. The trainer frowns at my lack of stamina.

He measures my body fat: twenty-two percent. One less percent and I would have a Poor rating, but instead I make the grade for Very Poor.

I don’t realize this consultation is a sales pitch until I’ve suddenly found myself signed up to meet with a trainer once a week for ten weeks, which should be enough instruction to keep me from pulling every muscle in my body.

I need to eat a lot more protein, get eight hours of sleep a night, weight train thirty minutes three times a week and do cardio four or five times a week, and I’ll have the body I want by Christmas (or so the sales pitch goes). The new Bobby Pinker.

My head hurts and I wish I could throw up as I drive home from my first night at the gym. A promising start.

* * *

Lunchtime at Paine-Skidder. For the past two months or so you could find me poring over my notes about Ron at this time. But I’ve packed all of my notes and gadgets into a printer paper box and left it in the trunk of my rental car. So today I play mini-golf on my computer and listen to Radiohead in my headphones.

Then, my desk phone rings. A double-ring, so it’s an outside call. I groan, hoping it’s my mother making sure I’m alive and not a reviewer giving me new work to do. I pause my song, drop one of my earwigs and pick up the phone. “Paine-Skidder, this is Bobby.”

I hear a woman crying softly on the other end.

“Hello?” After a few seconds of silence, I’m about to hang up when I hear:

“I’m sorry about Ron.”

I recognize the voice. “Eve?”

“I never thought that could happen. I swear to God.” She sobs into the phone. I hear shouting in the background.

“What do you mean? Where are you?”

“Be careful. OK?”

“Why? What do you know about Ron?”

She doesn’t answer. Just before she hangs up, I hear a car drive by in the background and realize where she is.

I slam the phone down and run to the stairwell. What did Eve have to do with Ron’s death? As far as I know, Eve only knows what I told her about Ron. Did he not kill himself after all? Did she drive him to kill himself?

The sunlight burns my eyes when I fling open the door to the outside. I run past the adjacent office building, huffing and puffing. I picture my personal trainer jogging beside me with his disappointed frown.

As soon as the bridge comes into view, I see all the lanes in both directions filled with stopped cars. I see an ambulance trying to wedge its way onto the bridge. A half-dozen onlookers stare over the rail, their faces too small to see their expressions. I follow their line of sight down to the river below, where Eve’s mangled body lies across the rocks in this shallow part of the Schuylkill.

This turn of events seems, at this moment, like a cruel punishment for losing faith in myself, in my quest to find Ron’s killer. I feel like, in a karmic sense, Eve’s blood is on my hands. And in a literal sense, Eve’s blood
is
on my hands.

As usual, my warped brain finds a way to twist this into something positive. This is a message from the heavens that I was on the path of the righteous and I need to get back on it.

I feel the crushing agony of having been right all along. Ron’s mother was wrong. The cops were wrong. Everyone was wrong except me.

I really do have the gut of a detective.

I still have to become the new Bobby Pinker. I need to be stronger and sharper to find the killer that I now know is real.

Unless the killer was Eve. Then I won’t know what to do with myself.

One of the EMTs takes my shirt off of Eve’s face and examines her to confirm the obvious.

After hefting Eve’s shell onto the gurney and covering her with a blanket, the EMT timidly offers me my own, now-bloody shirt. I politely decline.

One of the cops helps me to my feet without my consent, gracefully guiding me to the riverbank. He keeps a hand on my shoulder as I look up and see half of Paine-Skidder standing in the outdoor lot, staring at me. The bridge is visible from one side of the building, so someone must’ve seen me in the river.

They look like they’re outside for a fire drill, talking and gesturing. I see Suzanne crying with a group of women who keep hugging each other.

Most of the men stand in solemn awe, not talking or moving: Cody. Keith. Stupid Harry Brody stands there drinking a Coke like he’s at the company picnic. I want to strangle him with his own bushy mustache.

I wonder who knows that I had a fling with Eve. Did any of the women who sit near me ever hear me talking to Eve on the phone before I ran out?

The cop beside me pats my shoulder and asks me a question. I think I answer. Sounds come to me the way they do when I’m under water, directed at me but then deflected to the sides.

My metaphorically waterlogged ears pop.

“Did you see her jump?”

“No. I got here probably a minute after she jumped.”

“Did you know her?” The cop scribbles notes but keeps his eyes glued to mine.

“Yes. I need to talk to Detective Capillo.”

“Capillo?”

“You know him?”

“He’s homicide. You saying this lady didn’t jump?”

“No. She jumped. But she told me something before she jumped. Almost a confession, I guess—”