Cube Sleuth (19 page)

Stella douses her skin in cheap perfume to mask the sweat and mold smell that is common among heavy women. Strong perfume ranks high on my list of migraine triggers, so standing beside Stella’s cube proves an ordeal even before she opens her big mouth.

I knock on her cube, musky floral fumes swelling my tender sinuses. Stella is playing a game on
The Price is Right
website; she scrambles to minimize it after my first knock.

When she turns and sees I’m not her boss, she frowns. Her look says “I was communing with Mr. Bob Barker and you ruined my inner peace.” Her mouth is open as if to say “What?” or “Yeah?” but she doesn’t speak. I think I’m supposed to infer the what/yeah.

Hands in my pockets, I smile and take one step into her lair. “Hi, Stella.”

She doesn’t smile.

I cough as a pause. “Would you… let me take you to lunch?”

The woman who sits on the other side of Stella’s cube wall whispers “Huh?” to herself.

“You mean like a date?” Stella looks as disgusted by the thought as I would be.

“No. Not a date. No, no, not a date. No. I just,” I lean in and whisper to her, “I need some gossip and I know you’re the best source for that.” I say that like it’s a compliment and not a character flaw.

Stella smiles like it’s a compliment and not a character flaw. “I’ll go, but only if it’s Mauro’s and you’re paying.”

* * *

Of course Stella would rather go to this expensive Italian restaurant for lunch instead of grabbing a few Wawa hoagies. Luckily, having no one to date has afforded me some extra spending money.

Of course she orders an appetizer, skips the lunch menu, and gets an entrée. I’m sure coffee and dessert is in her plans for the immediate future.

Stella’s manners surprise me. She eats with her napkin neatly draped across her lap. She chews with her mouth closed, never speaks with her mouth full. Her elbows are off the table. When she gets sauce on her chin, she dabs it daintily with her napkin. She focuses on her meal, head bowed reverently; she probably won’t say a word this entire lunch I if don’t ask her something.

The trap of this lunch for me is that anything I say here will become the headline of the next issue of
The Kruger Tribune
. My strategy involves asking questions about a dozen different people and a bunch of rumors so Stella won’t know that I brought her here just to find out about Keith. Who knows, she may end up telling me something vital to the case about someone else.

I start with Eve. Stella definitely knows all about us; she may even think the purpose of this lunch is for me to check up on Eve like a jealous ex, which is fine by me. “Do you know if Eve is seeing anyone?”

Stella swallows her oversized bite of veal medallion slowly, savoring the flavor with closed eyes. She puts down her fork and looks at me with the amused superiority of someone who knows someone else’s secret. “You wanna get back with her?”

“No. It was fun while it lasted. What am I supposed to do with a woman her age? I got exactly what I wanted from that situation.”

Stella doesn’t pick up her fork. Gossip might be more of an addiction for her than food. “If you don’t care, why you askin’?” Her smirk makes me wonder if she knows about me following Eve across the Fayette Street Bridge. Maybe she thinks I’m a creepy stalker.

“Just wondering how she’s doing. She won’t talk to me anymore.”

“Did you break it off?” There’s an exaggerated ignorance in what she’s saying. She’s acting. She knows I didn’t end it, knows I followed Eve around, but wants to lure me into telling my side of the story. In poker, this is like when someone has a flush and asks you if
you
hit a flush to get you to divulge information about the strength of your cards so they know how much they should bet to keep you in the hand.

“No. She broke it off. And then I was a jerk to her. Wasn’t about her though. I was upset about Ron’s death and wasn’t myself.” I plan to mention Ron a few times to see if she knows something about him and will volunteer the information without my asking.

“She’s not with anyone that I know of. She never talks about any men she’s been with, ever. I thought she was a lesbo until I got wind of you two spicin’ it up. And even then she didn’t talk about it. I heard about you two from someone who saw you get into her car with her and not go anywhere.” Stella has a good laugh at my expense.

“Why’d you think she was a lesbo?” I never say “lesbo,” but I feel the need to now because I’ve never met someone who used it seriously before.

“Well, woman like that with a pretty face, great hair, decent set of tits, never been married, doesn’t talk about dating. You start to wonder. I don’t know. Maybe she’s just shy.”

I think of the things Eve whispered in my ear and wrote to me in notes, things so filthy they could make a perv like me blush. I picture her hand on my dick in her cube. Eve is many things, but shy isn’t one of them.

I ask about Cody, mostly as a decoy. She relays stories that I’ve already heard from Cody himself, but her versions lack the level gratuitous gross detail that is the hallmark of Cody’s storytelling.

Stella tells me that a woman who works in customer service is a functioning alcoholic and drinks a bottle of vodka every day for lunch.

She tells me about a woman in accounting who grew up in Bosnia. Her husband was a revolutionary, and she was in the room when soldiers beheaded him.

She tells me rumors that one of the managers left his second wife to be with his stepdaughter. That the janitor before Mumbles was part of an armed robbery gone wrong and is now in prison for second-degree murder.

She shows me the seedy underbelly of my workplace, and it gives me hope. If one guy who worked at Paine-Skidder could kill, why not another?

I ask her about Keith, wanting to know “what his story is.”

Stella has finished her meal and is now eating the remaining half of my French fries before coffee and dessert comes. “You know about his wife, right?”

I nod my head back and forth.

“She had some kind of accident a long time ago. Paralyzed from the neck down.”

“That’s awful. What happened?”

“We don’t know. He doesn’t talk about his personal life at all. And he’s in his office about ninety hours a week, so he probably doesn’t have much of one. I tend to think he stays here so late because he doesn’t want to go home to such a sad life.”

I feel a twinge of sympathy for my office nemesis and immediately try to swallow it.

“I could be wrong. It might not even get to him. He’s not particularly emotional.”

I think of Keith crying when he told us about Ron. Another twinge, another swallow.

“The guy has no friends in this place. He’ll be the first one to admit it.”

I’ve heard Keith say this before. It always struck me how he doesn’t seem remorseful about his lack of friends, that he probably believes work is work and isn’t about making friends in the first place. No need to swallow this time.

I ask about Suzanne. No story there, which doesn’t surprise me.

As Stella scoops up her first bite of tiramisu, I ask about Ron.

“He was
your
friend, what’re you asking me for?”

“I was just wondering if you heard anything floating around about him that I might not have heard. Rumors about why he killed himself. Or maybe him messing around with a girl from work. Or fighting with someone.”

Stella studies me from behind her lifted coffee cup. She must know this is the reason I took her to lunch. But as long as I don’t let on that I think Ron was killed, I’m fine with her thinking that this is all about him.

She lowers her coffee and brings a bite of tiramisu up to her chin, which I take as a sign that she has little to say on the matter. “Nothing I know of. I know he was an odd bodkin. No offense. I just heard that he had a weird sense of humor. People didn’t know when he was joking and when he wasn’t.”

I nod.

“No one knows know why he shot himself. Sad, really. Whatever it was, I doubt it was worth ending it all in your twenties. Smart guy, cute; I don’t get it. But you never really do with people who do that. It only makes sense to them. Something ain’t right upstairs. No offense.”

I rub my forehead in frustration (and because her perfume has given me a spectacular migraine). If she doesn’t know anything about Ron as far as Paine-Skidder is concerned, maybe there really isn’t anything to know. But on the other hand, Stella isn’t omnipotent. It’s possible that in terms of the very darkest stuff going on around this place, no one knows but the person hiding it.

Stella finishes her coffee, her dessert plate so clean it looks fresh from the dishwasher, and says, “Thank you for lunch, Bob. It was delicious.”

It’s Bobby, not Bob. “You’re wel—”

She burps quite loudly. There go her good manners. People at other tables look over and comment from the sides of their mouths.

“You’re welcome.”

Fifty dollars well-spent.

Driving home from work in a torrential downpour, I don’t worry about the gridlock that even a light drizzle seems to cause in Philly. I don’t worry about hydroplaning into the back of an eighteen-wheeler. Instead, I worry that I’ll get home, open my front door, and get crushed by a tidal wave of beige water.

In my mind, the wave carries the lighter objects in my apartment like they were kelp. Daggers from my knife block stab me in the eyes. My cry of agony is cut short when the pole lamp beside my futon impales me. Water runs under the doors of my neighbors, who look in the hall and see my body posed like the statue of a Christian martyr.

Nothing dramatic happens when I open my apartment door, but the problem tile in my bedroom already looks eight-and-a-half months pregnant with a dirty-rain baby. At the vertex of this smelly parabola, a tiny drip falls from a jagged crack in the tile like an iced tea IV drip.

I follow my usual protocol: angle the bed away from the drip, strip the bed, call my landlord to leave a death threat, make up my futon.

Sleeping on my U-shaped futon isn’t too much of an inconvenience. Having to run under the dripping Sword of Damocles whenever I need to get into the bathroom (the drip is, of course, in a perfectly unavoidable spot) doesn’t even bother me that much. What really angers me is the principle of the thing. I have the deadbeat dad of landlords.

I come up with one trick to make the situation less obnoxious: I line the inside of the bucket catching the water with paper towels to deafen the loud dripping pings until the water rises enough to cover the bottom. Then it just sounds like water dripping into a full tub—annoying, but bearable.

* * *

That night on the futon I have a nightmare.

I’m walking through Paine-Skidder’s P3 parking level. I lift the gun in my hand under my chin and check that the safety is off. My footsteps echo. It’s nighttime, but the ceiling glows with the same unflattering fluorescent lights that make my cube blindingly bright. The only sounds I hear are my own echoing steps.

Ron’s Jeep sits alone in the parking garage. I hear the engine running and muffled music playing through its closed windows. My nostrils flare from the scent of concrete and gasoline. I hear my heartbeat, and it’s as slow as my footsteps.
Clop. Beat. Clop. Beat. Clop. Beat
. The alternating noises are evenly spaced and play at the same exaggerated volume.

As I get closer to Ron’s Jeep, I see that, surprisingly, his windows are tinted. I knock on his window, where I see my solemn, focused reflection. I’m dressed in a charcoal gray suit with a matching tie and a light gray dress shirt. My hair looks impeccable.

Ron rolls down his window and I see that it’s not Ron in the Jeep. It’s me. Or, more accurately,
I’m
Ron. I’m the killer and I’m the victim.

Ron-Bobby turns to Killer-Bobby and smiles. “What’s up, homey?”

Killer-Bobby says nothing, raises a hand that is suddenly gloved. Killer-Bobby gently tilts Ron’s head until he’s facing forward. I—he—press the muzzle of the gun against Ron-Bobby’s temple and pull the trigger.

Ron-Bobby’s brains splash against the inside of the Jeep, but he’s still alive. He—I—cries, asking Killer-Bobby over and over why he did it. He slouches in his seat, blood pouring from his entry wound and spurting from his exit wound. As the blood slows down, stops spurting, dribbles out, his voice fades. He keeps asking me why I shot him, and the cadence of his voice reminds me of
I’m melting. I’m mellllltttttiiinnnng. I’mmmmmm mmmmeeelllllttttiiiiinnnnnggggg
. He closes his eyes, the last of his tears sliding down his pale cheeks.

Killer-Bobby puts the gun in Ron-Bobby’s lifeless left hand. He puts Ron-Bobby’s pointer finger on the trigger, aims the barrel at his own chest, and forces the finger to fire. The bullet hits Killer-Bobby in the chest and sends him to one knee, gasping.

Killer-Bobby rips open his dress shirt and looks down at his bulletproof vest. The crushed bullet sits nestled in the vest like gum treaded into carpet. He places the bullet in the inside pocket of his suit jacket. He leans into the Jeep and grabs the second shell, then strolls out of the parking garage, laughing quietly to himself.
Myself
.

I can still hear that laughter when I finally open my eyes. The drip of water into the bucket in the next room becomes eerie instead of grating. My throat feels tight and too dry to swallow. I turn on a light, stumble toward the bathroom. A drop of indoor rain lands on the back of my undershirt. I drink a glass of water and stare at my face in the bathroom mirror. It looks unfamiliar.

Back lying in bed and staring at the blur of my ceiling fan, I try to understand my nightmare. Clearly, it’s about grief. When Ron died, part of me died with him. But what about that bulletproof vest? It’s the perfect answer to how the killer could have fired a live round with Ron’s hand and not left a bullet hole. How did that specific detail end up in a dream about grief?

I remember hearing somewhere that your brain works on problems even when you’re not consciously thinking about them. For example, when you’re asleep. When you haven’t been able to figure something out for days and then the answer just pops into your mind, it doesn’t really just pop in there. Your brain has had this conundrum cooking on the backburner all that time, running through possible solutions at the speed of a sluggish computer. Then, when your brain finally reaches the answer, it ships it to the front of your consciousness.
Deus ex cerebrum
.