Cube Sleuth (26 page)

I think about how Eve looked under the bridge, and how I’d taunted her on that same bridge. Genuine tears fill my eyes.

Nick watches me carefully and then nods to show either me, or himself, that he believes me. “So weird. I thought I knew all about her. It’s amazing how people hold in big secrets like that. But she probably did feel guilty for giving you up. She loved kids. Loved her nieces. Spoiled them. Always wanted kids of her own, she said. Eh, sorry. I didn’t—”

I wave off his apology. “It’s OK. Can you tell me about her? What she was like?”

“She was beautiful. Really… alive. A warm person, someone who really cared about you. She wanted to hear your stories and she always remembered to ask you how this or that went.” Since he started with her beauty, I draw the conclusion that if he didn’t sleep with her, he definitely wished he had. His description of her makes me sad. She always listened to me that way.

Nick tells me some nice stories about Eve. Some funny stories. My warm smile comes from finally learning something personal about a woman that I ached to be close to for a brief but intense period. I wait for the right moment to ask him if Eve was seeing anyone while she worked there. As I ask this, I look down at his meaty left hand and see a wedding band.

I may be talking to Mr. Luther.

“No, she didn’t date anyone who worked here. It’s a really small company. Fifteen employees. Look at our lunchroom, it’s smaller than most company’s break rooms. This is worse than a small town. We all know each other’s business whether we want to or not. Dating someone here would be like dating someone you’re locked in a bank vault with. Plus, the owner has a strict policy against it.”

I look at his ring again. My question comes out as a raspy whisper: “Did you ever date her?”

“Did you hear what I just said? You don’t do that here. I’m married.”

“Sorry. I didn’t know if you were married back then. It’s just the way you said she was beautiful.”

“She was. I was single when she first started here, and I was in love with her. She wasn’t in love with me. Then I met my wife and that was that. Why are you so interested in who she was with?”

Uh. Uh. Uh
. “I thought if I found someone she was in a relationship with, they could tell me what she was like at home. Her family life and all that.” Nice save.

“She had a few boyfriends while she was here. I don’t remember any names. I doubt anyone here would, it’s been so long. She never seemed to last with a guy for more than a few months.”

I start watching Nick Wynant the way he’s been watching me, trying to see if he’s on the level. If he’s lying, he’s good at it. But then again, Mr. Luther would have to be an excellent liar.

Sometimes in poker, a guy moves all in and you’re not sure how strong his hand is. I’m not sure if you can do it in a casino, but in a home game you can flip over your cards before you call or fold to watch your opponent’s reaction when he sees what you’re holding. The theory being that if his hand is weaker than yours, he’ll look scared when he sees your hand. If his hand is stronger, he’ll look calm when he sees your hole cards. The player knows he’s being watched, so you need to study his eyes in the first milliseconds before he can cover his reaction with acting. You can’t watch your cards flip over; you have to do it without taking your eyes off your opponent.

I decide to turn over my hole cards. “Have you ever heard of Mr. Luther?” I lock in on his eyes before I say this, watching for a tiny glimmer of recognition, the glint of light that shifts across a moist pupil as it widens.

No glimmer. No glint. “Never heard of him. Who is he?”

I should have an answer for this, should have thought ahead. “I don’t know. I was hoping you could tell me.” I look up for a second and then add, “Maybe he’s my father.”

Nick doesn’t seem to notice how lame my answer is. If he asks me where I heard the name, I’ll really have no answer. I’ll have to escape somehow. The first escape plan that comes to mind is to jump up, scream “I’m turning into a werewolf! Ahhhh!” and run out, howling and ripping my shirt off. Foolproof.

“Sorry, the name isn’t familiar. Is there anything else you want to know?”

Phew, no need to escape. I’m glad; I really like the shirt I have on.

* * *

Nick Wynant drops me off at the receptionist desk. Before I leave, I tell her that I’m only in town for a few more days and I might need to talk to some more people about my mom. She gives me the names and numbers of two women in the office who also knew Eve well.

I figure that if I really was just talking to Mr. Luther, he fed me a load of horse poop. I need to get a second opinion.

* * *

Someone is lying. Either Faith lied to me about where Eve met Mr. Luther, or Eve lied to Faith about it, or Nick Wynant lied to me. Or maybe Nick really never knew there was a Mr. Luther; Eve’s own mother apparently didn’t. Or maybe there was no Mr. Luther, and Eve made him up to have an excuse for being beautiful and single. I come up with so many possibilities that I go mentally cross-eyed.

If Nick
is
Mr. Luther, telling him that I know about him was a huge blunder. Because then he knows Eve never had a kid, guesses I must be the guy from Paine-Skidder who slept with her. Maybe he was at the funeral, saw me in the back. Thank God I didn’t use my real name with him. He’d have to do some snooping on his own to find out who I am. Unless he read my name in the newspaper reports of Eve’s suicide.

Vince Codmist, what have you gotten yourself into now?

Things would be much simpler if I were the only one lying all the time.

I call Capillo on my drive home from work the Monday after I talk to Nick Wynant. “Any news on Eve? Ron?”

“Sorry, Bobby, haven’t been able to get to it yet. I had a more pressing case to deal with first. But that case is winding down already, so I think I’ll be able to look into your thing soon. You find out anything from your illegal investigation?”

“It’s not really illegal because I’m not getting paid. Unless I trespass or tap a phone, I’m good.” Or tape a voice-activated recorder under someone’s desk.

Capillo laughs. “You looked into it. Good for you. But I’m sure you’re doing illegal things whether you know it or not. Don’t worry, I’m not gonna blow the whistle on you. But not because I think you’re onto something. I’m really hoping you get yourself arrested doing something so silly it makes the papers.”

“You’re a true mentor. My name was in the paper this week already, that’s plenty.” I was briefly mentioned in several papers as the coworker who rushed to Eve’s aid in the Schuylkill. All of the stories on Eve’s death mentioned that this was the second suicide of a Paine-Skidder employee in the past four months and devoted at least a paragraph to Ron’s demise. “So here’s what I found out…” I tell him about Faith, Mr. Luther, Nick Wynant.

“Very interesting. Who’d you say you were at the staffing places?”

“Um, you know, Eve’s long lost son that she gave up for adoption.”

“Fake name?”

“Vince Codmist.”

Capillo howls and I hear a jumbled swishing sound. “Sorry, I dropped the phone. You’re such a cartoon, I love it. Vince Codmist. Where do you come up with this stuff? You should have your own reality show.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if Ron slept with Eve and Mr. Luther found out because Eve wanted him to, there’s your motive. Eve figures out what Mr. Luther did, she can’t live with the guilt, jumps off the bridge. Warns me first because I was another guy she slept with. It all fits.”

Silence as Capillo weighs what I’ve laid out for him. “It does fit. I still think Ron killed himself, but that scenario makes great sense. I’m writing this down.”

I smile proudly at this praise from a man who just called me a cartoon. “So, if you do—”

“Sorry, another call. I gotta take it.” Click.

* * *

I hate the gym, but forcing myself to go three days a week hasn’t turned out to be as hard as I thought. I’m a cheap guy, so knowing that I’m paying sixty bucks a month has been all the motivation I need.

I see improvement in myself every time I go. I don’t feel like I might puke up my liver after a thirty-minute walk/jog on the treadmill anymore.

Today, a guy who looks like the Vitruvian Man walks away from a machine and when I step up to it, I lower the weight from ninety pounds to six ounces. I feel like a wimp. I
am
a wimp. But at least now I can assign a numerical value to my wimpiness. I refuse to give up, though. The new Bobby Pinker is not a quitter.

After twenty minutes on the treadmill or elliptical, my head starts to clear. This is when I do some of my best thinking about Ron and Eve. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to find a connection between them that doesn’t involve them sleeping together. Did they both see something at work they weren’t supposed to, just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time together? What kind of wrongdoing could have gone down at Paine-Skidder that would lead to killing witnesses? Could the killer have killed Ron and been planning to kill Eve before she did him the favor? Was Eve part of whatever wrongdoing Ron saw, and knew he was going to be killed but didn’t stop it?

If someone was embezzling from Paine-Skidder, I’ll never be able to find out who it was. I have no way of finding out if funds are missing. I also doubt that there is anything of value to take from Paine-Skidder other than money, and since it’s a non-profit, there isn’t even much of that.

As usual, most of my thoughts lead to dead ends. I cross my fingers that my next big break won’t be another dead body.

* * *

I call the two women from Staff Something whose numbers I got from the receptionist. They both tell me that Nick Wynant had been obviously in love with Eve, that the two of them had never dated, and that Eve never talked about anyone named Mr. Luther.

It doesn’t seem likely that both of these women would cover for Nick, so I can safely rule him out as Mr. Luther. Unless he didn’t start seeing Eve until she left Something Staffing. Then it would make sense that neither woman knew about the affair.

Crap. The only person I can safely rule out as Mr. Luther is Bobby Pinker. Hopefully I don’t start having dreams where I’m having sex with Eve and she calls me Mr. Luther.

* * *

After four revisions, I hand in a version of the
Survivor
parody skit that has nothing Marilyn Gilgamesh finds offensive and doesn’t make her pant like she’s just run up five flights of steps.

My final draft is completely innocuous: wholesome but sarcastic. Fit for all ages, which is good because Dee Dee’s nine-year-old daughter will be at the retirement party. I even managed to drop in a few jabs at Paine-Skidder that are subtle enough to slip under Marilyn’s PC radar.

I hold seven laser-printed pages of accomplishment with BY BOBBY PINKER typed just to the left of the staple.

Marilyn tells me that my actors are three of Dee Dee’s closest friends at Paine-Skidder. I don’t know any of them, and they have no acting experience beyond the Christmas skits the company gave up on in the eighties. Working with three middle-aged strangers who don’t know what upstage and downstage mean will be more a test of my patience than my theatrical knowledge.

* * *

I hear the jingle-jangle of change bouncing toward me and automatically tense up. Harry Brody knocks on my cube wall. I roll my eyes and turn to face him as slowly as I can.

“Hello.” Paine-Skidder starts with
pain
; all of Harry’s conversations start with
hell
. His voice sounds the way drinking a glass of cold hot dog water would taste. He holds a small white box in his grubby mitts. I flashback to him holding that model ship and shudder.

“What’s up, Harry?” I look back at my monitor every few seconds to show Harry that I’m not invested in our conversation.

“I come bearing gifts.” He extends the box to me. I place it on my desk without opening it.

“What is it?”

“Go ahead and open it up!”

I go ahead and open up. It’s a white porcelain gravy boat identical to the one Harry shoves up his nose at his desk every day.

“It’s a neti pot.”

“Not yours, though, right?” I shudder again.

“No, no. Your very own.”

“Why did you…?”

“The other day when I was in here chewing the fat, I noticed the darkness under your eyes when you took off your glasses. That’s sinus pressure. You get a lot of sinus infections?” He tugs on both ends of his squirrelstache.

“Three or four a year.”

“Yeah, well, this will help you with that. You fill it up with warm water and sea salt. If you use regular salt with iodine in it, you’ll hurt yourself. Just half a teaspoon. You tilt your head and you pour the water up one nostril and it goes through your sinuses and comes out the other nostril. Want me to show you how to use it?” He reaches for the neti pot.

“No! I, uh, I’ll figure it out.” I pick up the neti pot, tilt my head, and stick it in my nose, knowing that now the germaphobe in Harry won’t want to touch it.

“Yep. Just like that. Start out doing half the pot in one nostril, half in the other. After a couple of weeks, do one whole pot in each nostril. You do that every other day and I bet you don’t get more than one sinus infection in a year.”

“Thanks, Harry.” People who seem not to notice anything obvious or important often see little details that most of us miss. Harry noticing the darkness under my eyes and failing to notice how much I hate him is a good example of this. Though I do appreciate the kind gesture. Harry may seem like a selfish ogre driven mostly by his belly, but I guess he has a charitable side.

I feel guiltier than usual for hating the big lug, and silently vow to be nice to him for at least the rest of the week. Since it’s Thursday morning, I actually have a chance of keeping this vow.

* * *

The next day, thinking about how I’ll never be able to see Paine-Skidder’s financial records makes me wonder how easy it would be to check HR’s files on Ron and Eve. Who knows what I might find there.