Cube Sleuth (6 page)

I wink at her and take the paper. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” She turns on her heel and disappears.

Eve likes to give me little messages in these abstracts. The second page will have a note attached that says COME ON MY FACE TONIGHT or I WANT YOU TO EAT MY PUSSY IN MY ELEVATOR WITH PEOPLE WAITING OUTSIDE. I eagerly flip the first page over to see what depravity will fill my evening.

I NEED TO TALK. MY PLACE. 7:00.

People only
need
to talk when one of them needs to talk about not seeing the other person anymore. Otherwise they just
want
to talk.

I rip Eve’s note to confetti. I kick my desk. I really need Eve right now, and she’s cutting me off. I’ll go see her tonight, but I won’t leave until I find out exactly why she’s ending it.

I wonder if my fling with Eve made it through the Paine-Skidder rumor mill. In a company of mostly women, rumors move like airborne diseases. Stella Kruger is the queen bee of this rumor mill. I want to hate Stella for being a gossip, but I recognize that this is her way of making the day go faster: it’s her Free Cell, her porn, her online poker.

People knowing that I’m sleeping with Eve doesn’t really bother me. Being a cheater might make them dislike you, but sleeping with a beautiful woman usually makes other women more attracted to you. But people knowing tomorrow that Eve dumped me
will
bother me.

* * *

“Why?” I fold my arms across my chest.

“Because…” Eve, crying, puts her hand over her mouth. In poker, people usually cover their mouths when they’re bluffing. Her other hand grips her coffee cup.

“How about a little more detail than just ‘because?’” I lean toward her but she won’t look me in the eye.

“I’m too old to play around, Bobby. I want a relationship. Stability. I want things you can’t give me.”

“Who says I can’t give you a relationship?”

“Well, I can’t give you kids. If we stayed together and got married, I’d be too old. And your parents would die. You know they would.”

“Why did you start this if you didn’t want it?
You
came after
me
.”

“I wanted…I think I just wanted to feel wanted.”

“You used me.”

“And what did you do?” The hand that was covering Eve’s mouth now points at me.

“Is there someone else?”

“No, but if I keep doing this I’m closing myself off to something more meaningful. And so are you. You’re great. You should be with some pretty young thing.”

“You’d rather be alone than with me?”

Eve covers her mouth again.

“Your timing sucks. I’m so glad I gave up Nancy for this horse shit.”

“I didn’t ask you to—”

“Go fuck yourself. I’m done with you. You see me in the hall at work, turn and go the other way. OK?”

Eve nods, starts to cry again.

I storm out of the room and get to the front door before turning back. Eve sits with her head on her forearm crying. “One more thing.”

She looks up.

“You didn’t happen to find a picture of Ron that I had in my wallet, did you?”

“No.”

“If you find it, I want it.”

“I’ll look around.”

“Thanks. But otherwise, go fuck yourself.”

“Right.”

I try to storm out again, but I know it won’t have the same effect.

The Fayette Street Bridge is less than a mile long and runs above the Schuylkill River. Walkways line both sides of the bridge, and at lunchtime you see men and women in suits crossing it for their daily dose of exercise—some alone, some in pairs or groups of three or four. The din of traffic beside you and exhaust fumes make it less than a walk in the park, but after four hours caged in your concrete zoo, it’s like the Disney World Monorail.

Eve walked across the bridge every day at lunch, wearing whatever bold-colored, out-of-style suit she had on that day and those obnoxious white Reeboks. A path behind Paine-Skidder runs along the river and leads to steps that go to the surface of the bridge. She never let me walk with her, but I knew this had been her routine for years.

As a newly jilted boy-toy, I make it my first order of business to ruin that routine. I park my car in the outdoor lot beside Paine Skidder so I can see her heading for the steps to the bridge. When she gets close to the steps, I get out of my car and jog toward her. I get close enough that she can see me but not so close that it’s harassment.

The first day, Eve doesn’t see me until she turns around to walk back across the bridge. She stops momentarily, makes eye contact, then walks bravely past my thanks-for-nothing smirk.

The second day, she’s on the lookout for me and spots me before she gets halfway across the bridge. If there’s a way back to Paine-Skidder without using the bridge, neither of us know it, so she has to come back the way she came. She crosses the street at the end of the bridge and walks back on the other side. So do I.

The third day, she’s had enough. She walks up to me. “What do you want, Bobby?” She tries to look tough, but I can see she’s afraid.

I keep the smirk going. “Exercise. A breath of fresh air. The cars ruin that, but the view is lovely.” I point to the Schuylkill, which looks nice enough despite being mostly unswimmable. On either side of the bridge the river is shallow water and jagged rocks.

“Don’t do this. Have some class.”

“Oh, you know
all
about class. What we did in my car. In your elevator. Classy lady.”

“Let it go, Bobby. It’s for your own good. Trust me.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Eve shoulders past me and shuffles back the way she came.

The next day I sit in my car all through lunch and Eve never shows. Same thing the day after, and the day after that. Mission accomplished. I’m sure Eve found somewhere else to walk, but at least I put an annoying crimp in her daily routine, and that’s good enough for me.

* * *

The Monday after I ruin Eve’s lunch walk, I stand outside Paine-Skidder holding the business card of the detective who whisked me away from the scene of Ron’s death. The card reads JASON CAPILLO, HOMICIDE DETECTIVE, WEST CONSHOHOCKEN POLICE.

I call him on my cell phone to see if he has any leads.

“Leads?” Capillo sounds incredulous.

“Suspects. Something. I don’t know.”

“Mr. Pinker, your friend’s death was officially ruled a suicide.”

“Your card says you’re a homicide detective.”

“I am, and this case isn’t mine anymore. It’s probably closed.”

I explain to him about Helen, about Not For Mixed Company’s show.

“Ron was bipolar, Mr. Pinker. There’s no logic to what he did. It’s brain chemistry. An imbalance. I know it’s hard to accept.”

“I talked to him that day. He wasn’t down. He was fine.”

“They can hide it well. Look: there were no signs of foul play. No fingerprints that didn’t belong—”

“Guy could’ve worn latex gloves.”

“There’s more to it than that. And no one had any reason to kill the guy. None at all. And the evidence was definitive.”

“What’s the other evidence?”

I hear a beeping phone in the background. “I’m sorry, Mr. Pinker, I need to take this. I’m sorry for your loss. Hang in there, OK?”

“Thanks.”

Click.

Capillo is wrong. They all are. It seems simple to them and they have no reason to keep looking. Ron’s mother accepts the suicide theory. There’s no pressure, no one pushing the police to dig deeper. Ron was a middleclass nobody, no political affiliations, no connections. I’m all he has now.

Ron didn’t seem like a guy who had enemies, but he must’ve had at least one. Someone he knew, someone who could stroll up to his Jeep and get him to roll down the window. Someone who knew he was bipolar, knew to make it look like a suicide and not a mugging.

I fear that the killer isn’t Ron’s enemy. Maybe he’s just some nut. Someone who met Ron or saw him somewhere and became obsessed with him. Someone I could never find.

I can only accept the random psychopath option after exhausting all other possibilities. I need to know a lot more about Ron’s personal life; Ron’s mom is clearly not a viable resource. I go back to
whitepages.com
to find Helen Dale’s phone number.

“Hi, this is Bobby. Um, Pinker. We met—I was doing a show with Ron.”

“Bobby, yeah, hi. How are you?”

“OK. You?”

“Yeah, I’m OK. I mean, not really at all. But—”

“No, me neither. Yeah, awful. But that’s…anyway, this is probably weird, but I was hoping we could get together to—”

“Yeah, definitely. Definitely. I meant it when I said we should be friends. I didn’t think you’d—how did you find my number?”

“I looked it up.” I decide not to spoil her enthusiasm about becoming friends with my fact-finding ulterior motive. I’m actually looking forward to her company as much as her knowledge about Ron. She’ll be a sympathetic ear, maybe the only other person who shares my gut feeling that Ron’s death wasn’t suicide.

Actually, I’ve been thinking a lot about the way Helen held my shoulders at Ron’s viewing. The way her two moist kisses dried on my cheek. The smell of her hair.

“So, when’s a good day for us to get togeth—”

“Come by tonight. I’ll make you dinner. You like chicken fingers?”

If getting one of my interviewees to make me chicken fingers just like that is any indication, I may become the greatest private eye of all time.

* * *

I show up at Helen’s West Chester apartment with a little more product in my hair than usual, and an extra spray of cologne. Her hair has that same sweet strawberry smell. She kisses my cheek in the same spot, moist again, but this time it’s just one lingering press. She hugs me like we’ve known each other since childhood and haven’t seen each other in years. I oblige her this long awkward hug, feeling my body soften to her warm touch.

Well, most of my body softens.

She puts her mouth to my ear and says quietly, “I’m glad you came. We need to be friends.”

I weigh my response carefully and settle on the subtle, clever, articulate, “Yeah.”

When she steps back and flashes her tomboy grin, I see exactly what Ron was talking about.

She starts grilling me on my life story the second my butt hits her couch.

“I was in a sketch duo in college called Dead Man Talking. Me and my best friend Owen A. Hendrick. He always used that middle initial. He was weird like Ron. And he did all the writing like Ron. He moved to LA after college and I didn’t have the guts to go with him. He’s done some national spots and been in a few episodes of
Scrubs
. And I’m at Paine Skidder. Shrug. I didn’t do comedy again until I met Ron.”

Helen’s eyes light up each time I say Ron’s name, but then her mouth purses, like she’s dying to talk about him but also can’t bear to. “How’d you guys start doing sketch together?”

“One day Ron was talking to me in my cube, and when he left he said, ‘Whatever, I’m outta he-ere.’ It’s a quote from—”

“The State. Doug. Of course.”

“Yes! And I got the reference, and we talked about Dead Man Talking, and his group Professor Plum in the Hall with the Candlestick. He said they kicked him out because he wanted to do all the writing. I told him I didn’t write, I just wanted to act and do some ad-libbing. He was so happy he said we should make love. I said we should just form a duo instead.”

“I saw some PPHC skits on tape. They were pretty good. Ron was by far the strongest performer.”

“Yeah, so subtle. He could really act. It kills me that no one will ever see the show we were working on. It was great.”

Helen pats my thigh and sighs, then slips off to the kitchen.

She breads her chicken fingers with ground Cap’n Crunch cereal. She bakes homemade fries seasoned with an ethereal mix of herbs and spices. She makes cucumber salad. I am by no means a man’s man, but I am a man, and Helen is a man’s woman. She is—for lack of a better word—cool. And it’s not an act.

The only drawback about this man’s woman is that her fridge is filled with nothing but beer and a carton of orange juice that I assume is for screwdrivers. So I have a glass of OJ with my dinner, and Helen calls me a no-beer queer, which is apparently much worse than a two-beer queer.

Helen’s apartment has the simplicity and geometry of a bachelor pad, but with touches of style: quaint curtains, a few plants, a lime green accent wall. Her place is the kind of clean that has to be maintained. She definitely didn’t just spruce the place up before I got there. It smells like her strawberry shampoo. The only thing out of place in the apartment is a dozen dead roses sitting in a vase by her kitchen sink.

“You mind?” Helen holds up a brown cigarette.

“It’s your place. That a clove?”

She nods, dipping the cigarette between her lips. She slides a Zippo lighter from her back pocket and holds it between her thumb and first two fingers. She snaps her fingers and the lighter flips open. She rolls the flint-wheel against her thigh and the flame blossoms as she brings the lighter to the tip of her cigarette. I hate smoking, but Helen makes the act seem so sensual. And the smell of cloves is much better than regular cigarettes; instead of wanting to spray air freshener, I want to have some ham.

Helen goes to the bathroom. I walk over to the dozen dead roses and take out the card attached to the vase. It reads I LOVE YOU SO MUCH. I CAN’T WAIT TO SEE YOUR VAGINA. RON. I laugh out loud, but knowing that Ron sent these the day before he died gives me a chill. I tuck the card back in place before Helen comes out of the bathroom.

After our dessert of chocolate-covered strawberries and strawberry Pop-Tarts, Helen sits me down on the couch and picks up a deck of cards from the coffee table.

Even the way she shuffles the cards impresses me. Her fingers move deftly, her hands glide effortlessly. The cards dance for her. She has long, delicate fingers; nails unpainted but manicured. She lays out three rows of seven cards, face up. “Pick a card. Don’t tell me what it is. Just memorize it…you got it?”

I nod, blinking slowly to keep the image of the card in my mind.