Cube Sleuth (24 page)

“I’m sorry. It wasn’t me. I wouldn’t tell him anything.”

“I believe you.”

“I wouldn’t worry about him for a while. His right hand still looks like a pincushion. I guess he did that to your car left-handed. If he had use of his right hand, your skull would look like your car and he’d be in prison.”

A scary thought, but I’m happy that I have some time to protect myself.

I fill Helen in on all of the dead ends in my investigation, how I had given it up until today, about the leak in my ceiling, my new apartment. I don’t mention Nancy, just in case. She has little to say about her own life. Throughout the conversation, she uses little excuses—coughs, stretches, getting up to get a tissue—to move closer and closer to me until she’s nearly in my lap. I’m fighting with my lower half.

I’m not just horny. I’m also depressed and lonely, I realize. I haven’t touched a woman since the last time I touched Helen. Under the circumstances, Nancy might understand my moment of weakness. And we’re not together yet, so it’s not cheating.

Sometimes criminals never get caught for the bad things they’ve done, but end up in prison anyways for something they didn’t do. Either way, they’re in jail, where they belong. I have to be loyal to Nancy now to make up for not being loyal when I was obligated to be. I can’t ruin my one chance to be with her again—though, knowing her, she’d probably give me three or four more chances.

I touch Helen’s cheek. She leans her head toward my hand.

“Helen. I can’t.”

“Can’t what?”

“I’m with Nancy again. Well, not yet, but I will be.”

“You’re turning me down for somebody you
might
be with, eventually?”

“Yeah.”

She leans down and kisses my neck below my earlobe, a spot she knows has a direct line to headquarters. “You sure?” She slides her hand over my tent.

I jump off the couch. She stares at me, jilted and incredulous.

“I’m gonna go. Please, go see Ron’s mom.”

She nods, her steely gaze cooling my body temperature and sending the blood flowing back to my brain.

“Thanks, Helen. If I find anything out, I’ll let you know. You’re the only person who ever believed me about Ron.”

“I don’t know if I believed it so much as I wanted to believe it. I needed to. You know?”

Even if that’s true, I know she just said it to make me feel alone. It works. “Call me after you see Ron’s mom.”

I let myself out without looking back at Helen, afraid her glare will turn me to stone.

I sit alone in the last pew at Eve’s funeral. Another dead employee, another closed casket: a bad year for Paine-Skidder. Another dubious suicide, another dead friend: the worst year ever for Bobby Pinker.

I sit in the back to be by myself, but I also want to be able to watch everyone else.

I assume that the elderly woman in the front pew who sobs uncontrollably throughout the ceremony is Eve’s mother. Since there’s no elderly man sitting beside her, she’s either a widower or Eve’s dad wasn’t in the picture.

Eve was always a mystery to me. She found a way to give short answers to questions that seemed to only have long ones. If I’d shown up at the church to find a husband and six children grieving for her, I wouldn’t have been completely shocked. She used sex as a screen to hide her identity. For me, she pretended she was a hedonistic fantasy girl with no backstory or personal needs. Her needs were my needs. She was utterly convincing in that role.

I had unlimited access to every inch of Eve’s body. No restrictions. No suggestion was denied, no perversion left unfulfilled. Anything a guy might think to do to himself if he got to spend one day in a woman’s body, I could do to her. She made me feel like a god, like the only being in the universe, like she was just a figment of my lonely imagination.

But I never had any idea of what filled her mind as she stared off into the dark after we’d exhausted ourselves in her bed. When the sex was over, she made me feel like I didn’t exist. We would lie next to each other like two empty heroin syringes.

I tried to coax her out of her shell, get to know her, be her friend. I told her my life story. She listened, asked questions, made comments. But when I was done, so was the conversation. In fact, we didn’t really have conversations; I lectured and she took notes.

Our age difference made a relationship impractical, so Eve worked best as interactive porn. But her refusal to open up at all also felt like a rejection.

Sitting in the back of this cold stone church, I wish more than ever that she’d shown me some semblance of who she was. The only time she talked about herself was the day she ended our non-relationship, and I am sure she was lying to me about some part of her motivation for that. Now I could never be her friend. My last meaningful interaction with her was when she shot down my offer to change her flat tire.

Whoever knows the reason why Eve decided to ruin her lunch walk once and for all must be in this church with me. I don’t know who Eve’s close friends are; I’ll have to find out from Stella.

I refuse to let myself mourn for Eve until I know exactly what role she played in Ron’s death. If she killed him, the only reason to be sad is that I’ll never get revenge.

What I feel instead of sadness is misplaced guilt. What Capillo said about me being the only obvious connection between Eve and Ron really got to me. Could I somehow share the blame for both of their deaths? I have no reason to think that. The connection between Eve and Ron is somewhere out there—or, more likely, sitting in one of these pews. I need to start digging right away.

During the mass I scan the pews for anything out of the ordinary. Someone sitting in the front row that I didn’t know was close to Eve. Two people consoling each other that I thought were strangers. What I really hope to see is a villain nefariously twirling the end of his mustache and snickering, but no such luck.

From where I sit I can see everyone and hear no one. I look for someone who looks frustrated instead of sullen. The killer might have gotten away with murder if Eve hadn’t warned me. This person is clearly a perfectionist, but human nature is chaos, and Eve put a tiny crack in his/her perfect crime. He/she has no idea that Eve warned me.

I have the feeling that, had I sat with the other Paine-Skidder people, they would’ve pushed away from me or moved to another pew. After seeing me holding Eve’s open skull in the river, they don’t know what to say to me. I’ve been getting a lot of nervous smiles and head nods in the hallways. A few brave souls are able to muster a hello. Either people feel sorry for me, or Capillo spread the word that everything I touch turns to suicide.

Eve’s sea shell-colored casket rolls slowly towards me. The morning sunlight strives to fill the room with light but only reaches the back pews before melting in the red glow of votive candles. I try to picture Eve inside the box, wearing a pretty dress, face sewn back together, make-up blushing her cheeks, eyes closed, hands folded on her chest. At peace.

What floods my mind instead are images of the pink Schuylkill begging me to drift into it, her brain reaching out of her head like a spilled oyster, her open mouth bubbling with river water. I see her stuffed into her coffin soaking wet, bloody and crumpled, Ron dumped on top of her, the coffin placed in a hearse that looks like a hunter green Jeep Cherokee, driven by me.

When the coffin passes me, I duck out the side door and drive home. Suzanne told me I didn’t have to come back to work. After that scene under the bridge, I could come in once a week wearing just pajamas bottoms and not get in trouble. I have trauma-induced carte blanche for a month or two, and I intend on exploiting it. I’ve earned it.

* * *

My insurance covers the damage to my car, so I only have to pay the $500 deductible. It also covers part of my rental car fee, but my out-of-pocket expenses for the remainder will be a hefty sum. The auto-body shop tells me it will take infinity-minus-a-week to un-Theo my car.

I spend the afternoon of Eve’s funeral driving carloads of my belongings to my new apartment in my rental. Despite only being a fifteen-minute drive from my old place, I feel like I’m on a distant peaceful planet as soon as I step into my new abode.

On Saturday my brother takes me to IKEA in his SUV to buy all my new build-it-yourself furniture. We carry the few pieces of furniture that survived from my old place in the back of his SUV

My parents meet us at the new apartment and help me build a new life.

* * *

Helen calls me after going to see Ron’s mother. According to her, if her son had been seeing a woman in her forties, she would’ve known about it. They were very open with each other and had few, if any, secrets.

Ms. Tipken also said that if I (I’m assuming she referred to me as “the retard,” and Helen didn’t have the heart to repeat it) actually found hard evidence for my theory (I’m assuming she said “bullshit theory,” and Helen didn’t have the heart to repeat it) that I could see her in person and she would help me as much as possible. That was nice of her to say (even if she did call me a bullshitting retard).

Scientists say each failed experiment is part of a learning process that leads to success, but every lead I’ve had about Ron has proved to be a complete dead-end. When he was alive, he was the most interesting guy I knew. Dead, he’s a snore.

The end of my phone conversation with Helen:

Helen: “You wanna hang out?”

Me: “Yeah. We should do that…sometime.”

“Oh. Well, give me a call sometime and we’ll get together.” The tone of her
Oh
says that she understands I added
sometime
as a polite way of turning down her offer.

“Will do. Thanks for talking to the dragon lady for me. I’ll let you know if I ever figure this thing out.”

“You will.”

“Thanks.”

I want to be Helen’s friend, but I can’t see her keeping things platonic. Maybe once I’m back with Nancy and Helen’s got a new beau, we can be pals. Until then, she’s just a temptation, and I’m just an old shirt of Ron’s that she puts on to remember him by.

* * *

I can’t concentrate on my work the next day, so I spend the morning writing the first draft of the
Survivor
skit for Dee Dee Satou’s retirement party. It takes two hours to write. I pick my characters, my plot, some gags. I read it over, and it isn’t bad. It’s a parody (strike one), and it isn’t very original. But it’s funny. It makes me laugh. It has a beginning, middle, and end, and it flows naturally. The characters speak with distinct voices and they each have tiny emotional arcs. It works, and is appropriate for this particular venue.

Huh. Maybe I can write after all. Maybe my problem is inspiration and motivation, but once I’m told what to write, I can bang out quality work. Maybe I can do comedy on my own, generate my own material, or at least contribute my fair share to a sketch group.

I feel proud of myself, a rare event indeed.

I email the skit to Marilyn Gigawatt, letting her know that it’s a work in progress and I’m open to suggestion. Ten minutes later, I’m in her office with the door closed. She loves the skit, laughed out loud when she read it, but thinks I was “a bit too harsh in the fun you poked at the characters and the company at large.” She talks anxiously, like she’s out of breath.

I nod, understanding that Marilyn is super-PC and scared to death of offending anyone, including me in this conversation. A recipe for comic death. But I’m undaunted, determined to be less offensive and somehow make the skit even funnier. The new Bobby Pinker welcomes the challenge. When I leave her office, we’re both smiling.

* * *

In the afternoon, I knock on Stella Kruger’s cube and she nearly jumps out of her seat, like she did the first time. She minimizes the
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
Website, spins in her chair to rebuff me for scaring her, but tenses up when she sees it’s me and instead quietly says “hi.”

No time for small talk, and no more free lunches for this busybody. “Who was Eve’s best friend here?”

The answer is on the tip of her tongue. “I don’t know if I should—”

“Tell me what I need to know and I’ll leave you alone.”

Her eyes widen at my blunt approach. “Faith Riley.”

I know the name but can’t put a face to it. “What department?”

“Same one as Eve. Their cubes were cattycorner.”

OK, so I’m clearly one of the least observant detectives in the history of detectivity. It’s a shortcoming and I’ll have to compensate for it with…pure gumption.

* * *

I step into Eve’s cube. It has the eerie emptiness of a room where a dead person spent a lot of time. Her nameplate is gone, her personal effects most likely mailed to the old woman crying in the front pew at the funeral.

I sit in the chair where my relationship with Eve began. I feel like someone stuck an ice cube inside the back of my collar, and I arch my back to maneuver the imaginary cube out through the bottom of my shirt. In less than a minute I feel completely spooked and go around to Faith Riley’s cube.

When I knock on her cube, Faith turns in her chair and the friendly smile on her face slumps into a grimace. Her eyes turn cold. My jaw tightens. I clear my throat. “Hi. I’m not sure if you know who I am. I—”

“You’re the asshole who stalked my friend.” She folds her arms across her chest dramatically. She’s very skinny, her face drawn and mousy. Her outfit is very fashionable; the pin stripes in her pants match her shirt match her jade earrings match the bows on her high heels. The bifocals hanging on a chain around her neck make her look like a grandmother, but her face looks early forties at the most. The huge yellow diamond in her engagement ring looks like a Jolly Rancher; the gaudy size of it makes her bony fingers look even more frail than they are. Her fiancé must be the portly outdoorsman in the dozen pictures tacked to her walls and in the frames on her desk.

“Yeah, that’s me. I was sorry about that. I told her myself. I never—”

“What do you want?”

I clear my throat again. “I want to know why Eve killed herself. I’m sure you do too.”