Cube Sleuth

I stand at the front of a meeting room, an uncomfortable smile like a wet leaf on a windshield stuck to my face.

To my left sits the president of the boring company I work for. To my right, the chairman of the board of said boring company.

In my left hand is a plaque that reads:
IN RECOGNITION
BLAH BLAH
5 YEARS OF SERVICE
BLAHDI BLAH
PAINE-SKIDDER
BLAH BLAH
BOBBY PINKER
. In my right hand, a hundred-dollar bill in an envelope. Yay right hand!

Not so long ago, when someone took a picture of you there was a click and a flash and you knew it was OK to move about freely. With digital cameras, if there’s no flash—and often there isn’t—you could stand there like the world’s dumbest statue until the photographer lowers the camera. Which usually takes forever.

My hands are clammy and my mouth is pasty. I’m not a shy person, but these types of artificial social events scare me. I’d rather be onstage naked playing the kazoo than stuck in an elevator with a coworker whose name escapes me.

OK, maybe not naked. But onstage playing the kazoo at least.

I barely know the president of Paine-Skidder. He likes me because I went to his alma mater. I envy his voluminous head of hair. He’s been with the company longer than I’ve been alive; he started in the mailroom and somehow ended up running the joint.

I know the chairman even less than I know the president. He has a beard. And a tweed jacket. That’s all I can tell you.

If the president knew that yesterday I stole two files from Human Resources for my investigation, he’d probably take my hundred bucks away, hit me in the back of the head with the plaque, fire me, and then have me arrested. In that order.

Coworkers receiving their own service awards sit watching me pose for pictures with smiles slightly less awkward than mine. I’m one of almost a dozen five-year employees. Some are ten-year employees. Some fifteen. Three are twenty. And five, including Stella Kruger, the office gossip, are getting awards for twenty-five-to-thirty-five years of service.

At twenty-five years, I hope you get a cyanide capsule instead of a plaque.

The photographer lowers his hand and I slink to my seat at the back of the room.

I admire my classy, well-made plaque until the woman across from me, Faith Riley, drops hers and it immediately comes apart. It’s just a slab of wood with a nice piece of paper over it, sealed with a cheap sheet of plastic and held in place with some crappy plastic screws. Oh well. At least the hundred dollars is real.

I would help Faith pick up the pieces of her plaque, but she hates me and thinks I had something to do with her best friend’s death, so I pretend not to notice.

Everyone in this room has been here five years or more. One person is missing, someone I really cared about.

A woman in my department once told me that we’re all dying a little more each day. Death doesn’t happen the moment you keel over or get shot or your parachute doesn’t open. Death happens cell by cell from the moment of your birth. Maybe it starts in the womb. Every day is a death, she said. This idea seems truest when I’m at work. That familiar smell in the office I’ve never been able to place: it’s probably the subtle scent of gradual death.

I want to change my plaque to read: IN RECOGNITION OF FIVE YEARS OF GRADUAL DEATH AT PAINE-SKIDDER BY BOBBY PINKER.

Today is Thursday, June 1, 2006. The day before what will be my fifth company picnic. My friend Ron Tipken, who sat across from me in this death trap for a little over a year, has been dead now for three and a half months. I might be on the cusp of answering the two most important questions that have plagued me since he died:
Who
killed him? And
why
? Or, I might not be any closer now than I was when I started my investigation three and a half months ago.

And come to think of it, I still need a lot of help unraveling most of the
how
.

At least I have
what
,
where
, and
when
nailed down.

Let me get you up to speed.

The only way to really understand what happened to Ron is to understand my life before I met him.

Before Ron started working at Paine-Skidder, life there was unbearable. The silence used to drive me insane. We weren’t allowed to listen to radios in our cubes. We couldn’t even listen to headphones.

My job revolves around articles about the codes that health care professionals enter into computers to catalogue patients, diseases, etc. I edit them. This is what it looks like:

Somewhere in the middle of my second year at Paine-Skidder, I had an epiphany that went like this: if I work a solid three to four hours every day, I will stay up-to-date on my workload and often be ahead of schedule. This will leave me with at least three hours to kill each day. In a year, that’s 750 hours, or the equivalent of thirty full days of free time.

Those thirty days of free time a year cause most of my trouble. My methods for killing time at work had four major phases.

Phase one: Hearts, Free Cell, and Sudoku.

Phase two: porn. I’m not a pervert, but spending fifteen minutes in a bathroom stall conjugating the verb to a picture of a beautiful naked young woman bending down to pick up nothing in particular is way better than sitting in my gray cube all day, daydreaming.

Phase three: online poker. At first I limited this to my two-hour lunch break. But then the game spilled over into my nightlife, and I ended up twenty-five grand in debt and with a broken fifth metacarpal from punching the wall after a bad beat wiped out my bankroll.

Phase four: sleeping with Eve Mothit. Ron was working at Paine-Skidder by the time this affair started.

* * *

No matter how beautiful a girl is, how sweet, how kinky, the one thing she can never be is another girl. Sure, she can role play, wear a wig and costume even, but she’ll always smell and taste just the same as she did without them. She can grow her pubic hair thick or shave it all off; it’s just sliding a sprig of parsley across the same old steak.

My ex-girlfriend, Nancy Marron, is beautiful. Way out of my league. Leggy brunette, brown doe eyes, pouty lips, straight white teeth, smooth creamy skin that’s pale and delicate in the winter and perfectly tan in the summer, great ass, perfect tits. Loves sex. Willing to try anything. Smart. Funny. Good cook. I knew I had hit the girlfriend lottery with her. And I threw that away just because I’d never been with an older woman before. I’m an idiot.

Eve was an administrative assistant who worked on my floor on the other side of the building. She was seventeen years older than me. Royal blue eyes. Thick curly red hair the color of a glass of wine when you hold it up to the light. A sparse spray of freckles across her high cheekbones.

Eve’s clothes were outdated; she sometimes wore suit jackets with shoulder pads, and a worse no-no, white sneakers with a skirt. But her voice was like a tongue tracing your earlobe. It was the sonic equivalent of thousands of tiny marshmallows dissolving in hot chocolate. And she wore these cute glasses that made her look like the naughty librarian in a dirty magazine.

Eve started working at Paine-Skidder about a year before me. I mostly interacted with her through email. We’d pass each other in the hall and say hi, or stop to talk about the empty kind of things you can discuss with relative strangers. She always laughed at my banter and said I should be a comedian. When she laughed, she threw her head back dramatically. Her neck was so sexy; I don’t know why. I loved that you could smell her perfume when she passed, and that if you stood close to her long enough, you could still smell her even when you got back to your desk.

Eve made the first move.

She calls my desk on a Friday before lunch to ask me to bring over a hard copy of an abstract. I think that’s odd because I can just email her the file, but I print out the abstract and hop over to her side of the building. My spirits are high because my boss Keith is out, which means I can slip out an hour early and start my weekend right. And it’s Friday, so I’m wearing jeans.

I knock on Eve’s cube and hand her the abstract.

She looks in my eyes and grabs the paper without taking it from my hand. “Thanks, handsome.”

Her voice rushes to the lower half of my body, along with most of the blood in my arteries.

Her eyes lock on mine. She doesn’t seem to blink. She wets her lips.

“You’re welcome, pretty…woman.” Smooth, Roy Orbison, really smooth. I maintain eye contact, but I can’t stop blinking. She has the upper hand. I’m intimidated, and I like it.

“You’re gonna make me blush.” She cocks her head to the side.

“Is that a bad thing?”

We each still hold one end of the paper. I crinkle my nose at Eve to ask if she’s really coming on this strong. She leans forward to show me that her chest has twice as many freckles as her cheeks.

You wouldn’t think I could look debonair standing in a cubicle staring at a woman’s exquisite cleavage with what is likely a noticeable erection, but I seem to pull it off.

Eve looks off, giggles, and takes the paper. She tosses it on her desk like a useless prop, asks if I want to sit. I nod, glad for the opportunity to shift my hips and help my boner find a comfortable spot in my boxer briefs.

Eve commences with conversation that I know will immediately descend into innuendo overload. She reminds me of a sailor on shore leave. I’m confused, but this is a fantasy that dates back to the beginning of puberty for me, and I’m excited about how close it is to coming to fruition.