Cube Sleuth (10 page)

In my mind, this scenario seems like a distinct possibility right now.

Going through Cody’s stuff doesn’t take long. I open every drawer, flip through every book, thumb through every file, and find only one personal item. Two, actually. Two back issues of
Playboy
: the February 1999 issue with Pamela Anderson on the cover wearing three long strands of pearls and a sexy pout, cover articles including “Adam Sandler Q & A: Dumb Questions, Dumb Answers,” and “The Playboy Interview Kicks It Up! Super Chef Emeril Lagasse;” and the June 1993 issue with Anna Nicole Smith wrapped in a white sheet with PLAYMATE OF THE YEAR in red letters across her lower back and right arm, “Playboy Interviews Roseanne and Tom Arnold” the only cover article.

At least when a guy puts
Playboy
s in his bathroom to show what a healthy heterosexual he is, there’s a good chance someone will actually see them. Since I doubt Cody is counting on an amateur detective tossing his cube, it seems that he keeps these in his desk to remind
himself
of how straight he is.

Other than vintage porn, Cody’s cube is bereft of personal touch. Not just bare, but spotless. All of his files are alphabetized, all of his volumes in ascending order by year, his pens lined up parallel to his ruler and to each other. No dust. No trash. He treats his cube like a bunk bed in a military barracks.

After making sure everything is as close to how I found it as possible, I walk out of Cody’s cube and nearly knock over the janitor.

“Hiya don?” Mumbles smiles, his lower lip swollen with tobacco, a dozen teeth evenly spaced in his gums.

“Hi, Lionel. How’s it goin?”

“Workeh late, huh?”

“Yeah. I’m on my way out now. Have a good one.”

“You too. Bah-bah-bah-BAHHH-bah-bah… Baddi-bah. Buh-buh-bahhhh.” Mumbles shuffles into Cody’s cube, and I’m sure he doesn’t wonder for a second what I was doing in there.

* * *

That night I drive around until just before 7:00 when the sun goes down, then park across the street from Cody’s duplex.

I ate Taco Bell in my car before driving to Cody’s. I figured that was the cleanest car food I could get, since a burrito is basically meat and lettuce wrapped in an edible napkin (no cheese on my burritos; I’m lactose intolerant). I’d driven around with all the windows down trying to air out the smell of processed meat, but it hangs in the air like the taste of a sour burp. My stomach grumbles and hisses, and I realize that I have nowhere to go in the case that I have to poop during my stakeout. I need to find a better car food.

March weather is ideal for doing surveillance from your car. The temperature is probably in the mid-fifties right now, perfect for sitting comfortably in a coat and not sweating or shivering.

Cody’s car is in the driveway, but the windows of his place facing the street are dark. Maybe he went for a walk or a bike ride and I’m staring at the empty top half of his duplex like a schmuck. Maybe I’m looking at his bedroom windows and he doesn’t spend time in there except to sleep. On the other side of the house is a backyard connected on three sides to other backyards. The fences are low chain-link, and if I try to stand in the alley looking up through binoculars, it seems likely that a neighbor will call the cops.

A full block of parked cars shields my own, but I wish I had a van with tinted windows. If someone walks by and sees me, I can hide the binoculars quickly, but I’m still sitting in a parked car like a doofus. I put my seat all the way back so I can lie flat and see Cody’s windows without craning my neck.

I train my binoculars on his dark windows until I see the open blinds crisply. I make out the shadow of a lamp by the window, but still can’t tell if this is his bedroom or living room.

I stay in that half-sitting-half-lying position for more than an hour, the silence whining in my ears at subtly changing frequencies like a high-pitched air conditioner. The book I read on private investigation said that surveillance is eons of intense boredom broken up by brief moments of interesting activity. Even though I only intend to stay until midnight, the amount of silence that stands before me makes me want to take up alcoholism to pass the time.

At 8:22, the lamp near the window pops on. I sit up straight, jamming the binoculars against my eye sockets. Through the blinds, I see Cody. Not his face, his ass. His white, white ass. I can see his naked body from the middle of his neck to the top of his thighs.

Tightening my focus, I notice something around his neck—a noose, maybe a collar—and a cord coming from the noose/collar in a straight line that stretches beyond the window’s perspective.

Before I can figure out if someone is choking him or if he’s attempting to hang himself horizontally, the cord bends into a soft smile. The smile lowers and contracts. At the other end of the cord—the leash—stands Jeanette Baldwin from Paine-Skidder’s accounting department.

Jeanette’s outdated poofy coif and matronly glasses (octagonal lenses with stems that slope down her cheeks, go straight across, then loop high over her ears) are familiar, but her shiny red bustier is a new look. The material shines brighter than leather; it’s vinyl or latex. She looks like she’s wearing a big Fruit Roll-Up. Her sagging breasts end in hard nipples that tent the fabric.

Between Cody’s ass and her nipples, I want to find a pair of brooches and stick them into my eyes like Oedipus.

Jeanette nods toward the window, and as Cody turns to close the blinds, I duck down and tilt my binoculars up at what I’m now sure is his bedroom. Cody’s face looks odd, like he’s yawning. As he closes the blinds on all three windows, I get a few different angles of his face and see that his mouth looks weird because there’s a ball gag in it.

* * *

Cody’s blinds haven’t opened by ten o’clock, so I decide to call it a night.

Driving home with a stiff neck and no useful information for my case, I ponder how comically accurate my private investigation manual was about surveillance.

The morning after I surveilled Cody Heet’s duplex, I get in the elevator at Paine-Skidder. As the door closes, I hear a timid, squeaky voice say, “Can you hold that for me?”

My finger whips to the OPEN button, a reflex I’ve honed in my five years at this tedium farm. Were there a contest, I’d be the quick-draw champion of the elevator. With both hands full, I can use an elbow or my foot just as quickly. The little things we do to amuse ourselves.

I don’t recognize the squeaky voice, but as the doors reopen the smiling face of Jeanette Baldwin shocks my sleepy eyes. Same coif, same Maude glasses, but the cherry red bustier has been replaced by too-light mom jeans, a Tweety Bird yellow sweater, and white Keds. Casual Friday indeed.

Despite never having shared an elevator with Jeanette before, I’m not surprised to find myself stuttering pleasantries the morning after I saw the horrifying image of her low, hard nipples. That’s how things work in my life.

I stare at her Keds the whole time. “Yeah. And just as fast with my foot and my elbow.” This conversation saves me whenever a relative stranger gets into the elevator thanks to my quick-draw.

“It’s quite a skill.”

“The things we do to amuse ourselves. Right?”

The doors open at the lobby and I give Jeanette a have-a-good-one as I head for the stairs to avoid a second round of chit-chat in the other elevator.

* * *

My work phone double-rings early that afternoon. Single rings are in-house calls, double rings are outside calls.

“Paine-Skidder. This is Bobby.” My voice goes up on
Bobby
, an inflection perfected from years of practice.

“You busy Monday?” says Helen’s sweet sexy tomboy voice. No hello-how-are-you. Right to business.

My social calendar has been pathetically blank without Nancy, Ron, and Eve, but I make sure not to let my voice betray my enthusiasm, even for a Monday date. “Um, I don’t think so. Nothing I can’t reschedule. What’d you have in mind?”

“Can you be ready at four o’clock? I’ll pick you up.”

“I work ‘til five-thirty.”

“Take half a vacation day.”

“This a date?”

“You already put out. I owe you a little wine and dine.”

“Where to?”

“I’ll be at your place at four o’clock on the dot. Don’t keep me waiting. Dress, like, business casual, I guess. Click.” Then she hangs up. She says
click
and then hangs up. This is why Ron loved her, and why I could fall for her. A genuinely cool girl with a jones for dorky comedians. An attractive, smart girl who would rather date Jon Stewart than Colin Farrell.

The reason guys like me spend their whole lives wisecracking and self-deprecating isn’t because we’re wired that way, it’s to attract our very own Helen.

* * *

“This one is an S & M freak.” Cody’s mustache expands with his shit-eating grin. As usual, he sits on my desk with one foot perched on a chair so his crotch is out in the open, like he can’t stand to have his legs closed, the way some people own “outside dogs” that they would never coop up in the house.

My smile, the tell-me-all-the-dirty-details smile, is usually fake anyway. Don’t get me wrong, his stories make my day, and the best laughs are in the dirty details. But the smile itself is fake. The entertainment comes from cringing, gagging, hiding my eyes—all on the inside to keep from offending Cody and discouraging him from baring his perverted soul to me. The train wreck that is Cody’s cartoon of a life. So I smile. But this afternoon, the Miss America smile I’ve plastered on is my best attempt to block out the image of Cody’s white, white ass sliced by the blinds like a hardboiled egg.

“She has me dressed like a leather freak, like the biker guy from The Village People. Leather and studs and spikes and a whip.”

“You’re making this up! This is Jeanette upstairs?” It occurs to me that I never told Cody that I slept with Eve because I didn’t want to give him evidence that I was following in his footsteps.

“I’m not. Not making it up. She puts on a ball gag like Bruce Willis in
Pulp Fiction
. And a leash. An actual dog leash. Her dog’s real leash. It smelled like dog. And she has on this black cherry colored…”

The smile is glued to my face, but my mind starts to drift. A new layer of entertainment. Cody has no idea I know it was
him
in the dog collar, that I saw him at the window with the ball gag looking like a pig on a spit. I finally understand what my AP English teacher meant when he said that dramatic irony is so enjoyable for readers because it makes them feel superior, like they’re gods. I’m a smiling Buddha with more hair, a smaller belly, and less goldness. This giddiness makes having seen Cody’s white, white ass semi-worth it.

* * *

At two-thirty that afternoon, Mike Goatee from the mailroom delivers a small package to me. (His last name isn’t Goatee, but I forget his last name, and he has a goatee, so that’s what I call him.)

The package is my new voice-activated tape recorder. I tear open the box, skim through the directions, pop in the batteries, and then dash off to the parking garage to test it. My test sentence is “Someone killed my friend Ron, and I’m going to find him.” I play it back to make sure it recorded.

* * *

As soon as Keith leaves for the day, I go into Cody’s cube and tape the tape recorder under his desk. I tape it close to the wall where his legs won’t reach, then sit in his chair and slide the chair in as far as I can. Cody has six inches on me, but I’m convinced he won’t bump into my detective gear with his knees.

I crouch under the desk and talk to make sure the little red light comes on. It does. Six seconds after I stop talking, the red light turns off.

Walking back to my cube to grab my jacket, I hear Mumbles scatting near the elevators. He turns toward me as I walk past him on my way to the stairs. “Hiya don?”

“Good, Lionel. You?”

“Workeh late, huh?”

“Yep. I’m on my way out now. Have a good one.”

“You too. Bah bah bah BAH bahbah.”

* * *

On Monday, I stand with my back to my bathroom mirror, holding up another mirror to get a good look at my small bald spot and make sure the surrounding hair has camouflaged most of it. I hear a knock on my door and glance at the time on my microwave as I step out of the bathroom: 3:57 p.m.

“You’re three minutes early.” I smile and lean in to kiss Helen.

“Hellaw, Rodebrecht!” Helen speaks with a thick, non-distinct European accent.

“Huh?”

She leans her head forward to meet my kiss. Already our kiss has become familiar. “Invite me into your apartment, Rodebrecht.”

I look down at the shopping bag Helen holds; it’s full of clothes. “You spending the night?”

“If you play cards right!” The consistency of her accent shows me she rehearsed this.

I close the door while Helen takes off her jacket. She wears a matching Adidas tracksuit, navy blue with three yellow stripes down the sides. “You said dress business casual.”

“A bit of misdirection, Rodey. Please, go into your underpants.”

I squint to show that her broken-English construction confuses me.

“Take off the shirt, the shoes, the slacks. Do this now.”

In moments, I’m wearing nothing but black socks, light blue boxer briefs, and a white undershirt. Helen pulls another tracksuit out of the shopping bag, this one yellow with navy blue stripes. I look like a crayon when I put it on. I cuff the sleeves and roll up the pants at my waist to make them fit.

“Very good, Rodey. I am your wife, Helena. We are the Vigos from Moldavia, visiting the Philadelphia for the first time.”

I laugh, but inside I feel like I want to vomit. This foreigners-in-track-suits idea seemed familiar, but I wasn’t sure why until she said our last name and where we’re from. Vigo is the bad guy in
Ghostbusters II
; he was a ghost who had been ruler of Moldavia.
Ghostbusters II
was one of Ron’s favorite movies. This first date with Helen is one of the exact first date ideas Ron bounced off me during breaks at rehearsal for
Love from Every Position
.