Cube Sleuth (8 page)

I expect Helen to show up with a box of Ron’s belongings, expect us to sit down, roll up our sleeves, and start to piece this puzzle together. Instead, I open the door and see her empty-handed with bloodshot eyes.

Deciding not to question what Helen has been crying about until I find out what she learned in Ron’s bedroom, I tell her to come inside and I lock the door behind us. Over my shoulder, I ask, “What do you have for me?”

She answers by sliding her hands around my waist from behind, stopping at the muscles that lead to my love zone. “Whatever you need.” She presses her forehead to the back of my neck.

“You know what I mean.” My love zone expands slightly.

“Look at me.” She raises her hands above my waist to turn me around.

Her eyes are moist; her sad pout looks vulnerably sexy. She gets so close to me you wouldn’t be able to slide an envelope between our bodies. Her hands squeeze my butt like she’s comparing the ripeness of two honeydews.

Not to brag, but my ass is composed of two extremely ripe honeydews.

With her eyes and hands, Helen starts pulling me the ten feet between the front door and the foot of my bed. Despite my now fully-enlarged zone, I want to tell her to stop.

My reason for wanting her to stop should be because she must’ve been crying about something she found in Ron’s bedroom, and it would be wrong of me to take advantage of her. But her sadness only makes me want her more: I need to wrap myself around her and take her pain away. The real reason I want her to stop is because it’s too soon. Helen is all I want, and getting her now means losing out on weeks or months of hoping, pining, planning, fantasizing, missed opportunities, mixed signals, regrets, frustrated obsession, and the thrill of eminent failure.

Even with the taboo of her being the emotional widow of my murdered best friend, I mostly just don’t want to lose the hunt.

“We should wait.” I can’t bring myself to actually say “no.”

“I don’t wait anymore. There’s no guarantee that we’ll both see tomorrow.”

Logic I can’t deny, and with meaningful experience to back it up. Plus, I’m dying to know what’s going on behind those cute beaver panties. Is she bushy, trimmed, or shaved clean? I bet she’s trimmed to just a silver-dollar patch. I already know the basic nipple situation thanks to the beater she wore the other night.

She kisses me, her sweet clove breath filling my mind with thoughts of sex and ham. I smell her strawberry hair.

As soon as we hit the bed, I take over. Because I’m funny, most girls expect me to be soft and sensitive in the sack, maybe even a little shy. But sex is one of the only things I do like a man. The other manly things I do include hating clothes shopping and bottling up my emotions for extended periods before letting them explode.

From the look on Helen’s face, she’s pleasantly surprised. For a guy my age, seeing all the tricks I have up my sleeve surprises her more. Now
I’m
the magician, pulling an endless string of multicolored knotted handkerchiefs out of her vagina like love beads. And just when she thinks I’ve finished my act, a tiny dove flies out of her ass.

The contrast between Eve and Helen floods my senses. Different perfumes, lotions, hairstyles, clothing. And the skin. Eve had soft and slightly wrinkled skin, almost loose from the muscle; it moved in my fingers like satin sheets. Eve’s skin comforted me. Helen’s skin is fresh and taut. Not soft, but infinitely smooth. When I touch it, I feel energy.

In the middle of our coitship, Helen says, “Tell me you love me.” And I do. Do tell her and do love her. She is my world right now, my only friend and the only person who believes me. I say it again and again. So does she. The feeling is incredible, intense, and then I can’t stop thinking about Nancy. The irony of this isn’t lost on me: I sometimes had trouble thinking about Nancy when she was the one beneath me.

When I’m not picturing Nancy, I wonder what Helen found in Ron’s bedroom. If I weren’t sure it would kill the mood, I might try and slip the topic into dirty talk.

When we’re done, I ask Helen if she wouldn’t mind smoking a cigarette and looking like I just rocked her world, and she obliges me with a giggle. She really nails the you-just-rocked-my-world look with a mix of elation, wonderment, and fear.

As if reading my mind, Helen tells me what I need to know moments after putting her panties back on (panties that cover a beautifully bare yum-yum, so I was wrong). “Sorry, Bobby, I looked through every single thing in that room and didn’t find one thing that could help us.”

“Not one thing?”

“Nothing weird. Nothing suspicious.”

“Something that made you cry?”

“Huh?”

“Your eyes when you got here.”

“Yeah. It was nothing related to what we need.”

“What was it?”

“It’s personal.” Her tone ends the exchange. She puts on the shirt I’d been wearing before we schtupped and walks out of my tiny bedroom. “Whattya’ got good to eat in this joint?”

I tell her to help herself to whatever I have.

She coos, her head in my fridge. “Aw, you sweetheart.”

“What?”

“You bought beer for me.”

For an investigative sidekick, Helen proved to be an incredible piece of ass. She really hadn’t found anything in Ron’s bedroom that would help me. Ron put the same goofy motivational notes to himself in his dresser drawers that I found in his cube. He had five rubber chickens in his room, each with its own name written in red marker across its chest: Bill Bixby, Bill Cosby, Billy Ray Cyrus, Bilbo Baggins, and Bill of Rights. He had a xylophone and a book on how to play it, something Helen and I hadn’t known. He owned two tuxedos, one powder blue, the other tangerine. In his closet, he’d kept every yearbook from kindergarten to college, stacked in chronological order, all in pristine condition.

What Ron didn’t have in his closet was skeletons.

Sitting in my cube, rotting, staring at an entire article devoted to the OTHER category for race on health care forms, I mull over the fact that Ron seemed to have no enemies.

Then my thoughts drift to the guilt filling the void that had been left when I conquered the all-too-willingly-conquered Helen and lost the thrill of the chase. My body drained of its sexual energy from the night before, I feel the way a teenage boy might feel after masturbating to thoughts of his sister. (Since I don’t have a sister, this feels like a safe analogy.)

Then I wonder again what Helen found in Ron’s room that made her cry. The only interesting thing in her scavenger hunt, and she won’t tell me what it is.

Then I spend ten minutes trying to remember the name of the killer in the movie
The Fugitive
. Not the one-armed man; he was just the hit man. The killer was Dr. Richard Kimball’s good friend, another doctor. I can’t remember the character’s name or the actor who plays him. I go through the alphabet in my head, making the sound of each letter to see if that brings his name to the tip of my mental tongue. No luck.

The sad thing about that movie, the tragic part that I don’t think the movie adequately addresses, is that Kimball is, in a roundabout way, the cause of his wife’s death. The hit man comes to kill Kimball, but kills his wife because she’s home instead of him. That must’ve torn him apart with guilt.
What
was that killer’s name?

I eventually give up and check the Internet. His name is Dr. Charles Nichols, played by Jeroen Krabbé. No wonder I couldn’t think of the actor’s name.

Thankfully, my short-attention-span mind finds its way back to Ron. He had no personal enemies that I know of, and it was unlikely that he had any enemies at work. Suddenly, one simple fact slaps me across the face and it’s the most glaring clue I have: Ron died at Paine-Skidder. Why here? If the killer wanted to make it look like a suicide, he should’ve gone to Ron’s house and killed him at night. I bet most suicides take place at home, and since Ms. Tipken worked nights, Ron was almost always home alone. The killer shot Ron at work because that was the most convenient place for him to set it up. He could plan his act there; control certain things.

The killer works at Paine-Skidder.

The killer must’ve considered shooting Ron at home and decided work was easier. A big risk, but the killer probably thought it would be worth it because he found some trick to make it look like suicide, something he could pull off on P3 but not at Ron’s house. But what was this trick?

Good. I’m starting to get into the killer’s head. That head is somewhere in this building, thinking it got away with murder. That head has no idea that I will retrace its steps and find the body it’s attached to, and then send the body and its head to life in prison or death by lethal injection.

The first person I need to talk to at work is Beatrice Jenkins, the poor old lady who found Ron’s body. I’ve never spoken to her before, as far as I know. My portrait parle for her at the moment is “old black lady.” I don’t know which department she works in or on what floor. Even when I find out her department, I’ll have to navigate the labyrinth of identical cubes to find her. Ah, the challenges that a detective faces.

* * *

My supervisor Suzanne knows where everyone sits. I think that’s how people become supervisors: they take a test on where everyone sits and what everyone’s jobs are.

I grab an empty interoffice memo folder and knock on Suzanne’s door. “Do you know where Beatrice Jenkins sits? This came to me by mistake.” A clever—if unnecessary—ruse.

“She sits twenty feet from where you sit. Just go around the corner there, she’s on the right side near Fred Syke’s office.”

Man, I need to walk around the office more.

* * *

“Hi, I’m Bobby.” I stand outside Beatrice’s cube, a small yellow tablet and blue pen in my hands, smiling the way you smile when you see an acquaintance at a funeral. “I was… Ron was my best friend here.”

Beatrice nods slightly and sucks in air like she’s preparing for a punch in the gut.

“I’m writing a story about what happened to him. Kind of my way of grieving.” I am a ruse machine today.

“A book?”

“More of a short story. But not that short. Detailed. Like a novella. But non-fiction.”

Beatrice nods again. She wears a bright blue floral pantsuit. Her hair is dyed an unnatural gold color and pulled into a tiny ball in the back of her head. She doesn’t invite me to sit, doesn’t ask me what I want from her. She waits for me to speak again. Her body looks rigid.

I tap my pen on my tablet. “Would it be OK if I asked you a few questions about that morning? I want to get the details right and the cops—I asked them for details and they said it was… private. Sealed information or confidential. Off-limits.” Will you shut up! She won’t be suspicious if you can just stop rambling. “So, can I ask you a few things?”

Her eyes widen slightly. “Now?”

“Are you busy?”

“I… not really. But…” She doesn’t want to relive that morning.

“It won’t take long.”

She stares at me for a few moments, probably hoping I’ll offer to come back later if that’s better for her. Instead, I point to her desk chair and ask if I can sit. She nods again. As I sit, she starts pinching the fabric on one leg of her pants with both hands.

I uncap my pen. “You come in at 7:30?”

She nods.

“Did you come in early that day?”

“No, but I got here a few minutes earlier than usual because traffic was light.”

Yes! She speaks in complete sentences! “No other cars were in the lot when you pulled in?”

“Just the Jeep.” She clears her throat repeatedly while I scribble notes.

“What made you look at the Jeep?”

“I was walking by it on my way to the elevator and I saw… all the… blood…in the window.” She licks her lips, then purses them. She swallows and snaps her tongue to gather saliva.

“Were all the windows on the Jeep rolled up?”

“I think one was open. Because the music in the car sounded loud to me. And I could smell the blood.”

“Do you remember how Ron was sitting?”

“Huh?”

“Was he slumped over? Sitting up straight?”

“Hunched over. Head hung down.” More lip licking, more swallowing and tongue snapping. She looks in her coffee cup and frowns when she sees it’s empty.

“Did you open the door?”

“I didn’t touch the Jeep.”

“You didn’t check to see if he was alive.”

She laughs in disgust. “If you saw him. There—he couldn’t have been alive.” She grinds her palms into her eye sockets and slowly drags them across her temples into her hair.

“Did you see the gun?”

“I saw the blood, saw him. I didn’t scream. I opened my mouth and nothing came out. I ran for the elevator. That’s the end of the story.”

I tap my pen against my upper lip. “Do you remember anything else about what you saw?”

Beatrice grimaces. “No. Unless you want to know what it’s like to see inside a boy’s skull.”

I feel bad for making her think about this, but turn it around on her for saying that. “He was practically a stranger to you. He was my best friend. I’m not trying to give you a hard time. I know you want to get past this. So do I. That’s why I’m here.”

Her face softens. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get all gory like that. I’m sorry. That’s all I know. It was real quick; I was scared, I ran. I told the police the same thing.”

I write BOBBY PINKER X526 on my tablet, tear out the page, and hand it to Beatrice. “Thanks for talking to me. If you remember something else, call me. I sit right around the corner there. You could email me, too, if you don’t feel comfortable talking; I’m in the directory.”

“OK. There’s nothing else I remember. But OK.”

I stand and turn to leave.

“Your friend, what was he like? Ron.”

I turn back to her and smile. “He was funny. Brilliantly funny. Hated to be serious. Liked to play jokes on me. He was a writer and an actor. An artist. He lived with his mom so she wouldn’t be alone. He was romantic. Sarcastic, but never mean. He was a good guy.”

Beatrice smiles with sadness, shaking her head in disappointment. “What a shame. Young boy like that. His whole life waitin’ for him. Why would he do a thing like that?”