Cube Sleuth (7 page)

“Which row is it in? One, two, or three?”

I point.

Helen scoops up the cards one row at a time. She deals them out into three rows of seven again. “I’m such a fucking douche nozzle. Why six weeks? Why not a month? A month was plenty of time to get over Theo. Actually, an hour was enough time to get over that shit-sniffer. I just needed the six weeks to detox from all the bad habits I had with him. Which row is it in now? One, two, or three?”

“Three.”

“If I’d said a month, we’d have had our first date and I could’ve at least given him some ass. I made him wait four years, then six more weeks. I’m a cunt.” She deals the three rows of seven again. “Which row? One, two, or three?”

“Two. You saying you put out on the first date?” I wink at her.

“I’m a total slut. Guy pays for dinner, he’s gettin’ in. And that’s just any old guy. This was—I loved him.” Her eyes fill with tears. “Last time: one, two, or three?”

“Two.”

She scoops up the cards again and starts flicking them at me one at a time. I giggle. The cards land in my lap, on my arms and chest. One by one she grabs the cards without turning them face up and throws them on the carpet, saying “no” to each one.

One card remains, sitting on my right forearm. “That’s the one.” She licks her fingers and rubs her forehead, then sticks the card to it. Ten of diamonds. My card.

“Awesome.”

“It’s a simple one. Startin’ you off slow.” Pulling the card from her forehead, she wipes her head with the butt of her palm.

“At least that one kiss you had was a doozy. He talked about it over and over. He forced me to act it out with him in my cube. Not the actual kiss, but the rest of it. Sometimes he was himself and I was you. Sometimes he was you and I was him. One time he played both parts and I played your car.”

Helen laughs with her whole body, tears pouring down.

“I’m sorry, Helen. Should I shut the hell up?”

She shakes her head no and downs the rest of her beer, wiping the foam from her lips with the inside of her forearm. “Good tears. You know?”

“He wrote the kiss into a one-act, mostly stage direction about the kiss itself. It had a few lines of dialogue. The last line is you saying ‘I love you.’ Ron goes, ‘She didn’t say that. I’m using my artistic license.’ He pulls out his wallet to show it to me, then says, ‘Shit. This is my
driver
’s license. I must’ve left my artistic license in my pea coat.’ My favorite part is that he—”

“Didn’t own a pea coat. Yeah.” We crack up. I have good tears to match Helen’s. I cover my face with both hands.

She grabs another beer, presses it gently against each of her burning eyes. “Do you think that if maybe we’d had that date, he’d still be here?”

“That’s stupid. Don’t even—Let me ask you this: Do you really think he killed himself?”

“What do you mean? Like, did I dream the whole thing and he’s gonna walk through the door any second?”

“I mean, do you think maybe he was killed?”

“He shot himself in the head.”

“Maybe someone made it look that way.”

She isn’t buying it. “Like who?”

“I don’t know. I’m looking into it.”

She gives me an are-you-shittin’-me? grin. Then she says, “Are you shittin’ me?”

“You talked to him every day, right? Did he seem down?”

“He was bipolar.”

“Did he seem down?”

“No, but—”

“Did he do or say anything that seemed like he was tying up loose ends, making peace?”

“No.”

“He was happy. Because of you. Not For Mixed Company. Life was good. He had no reason to do it.”

“Maybe he stopped taking his pills.”

“Where’d he get a gun? Other than stealing a gun from Theo’s gun rack, Ron wouldn’t know the first thing about where to get a gun.”

Helen sits up straight. Her face tightens, her eyes open wide. “You’re right. It’s too violent for him. He was a total pacifist. He would’ve used pills or something like that. You’re right.”

My heart flutters. I feel giddy. I want to kiss her. She’ll be in this with me to the end, until we find Ron’s killer.

“Who would want to kill him?”

“I was hoping you might have some idea. I already talked to Theo. I don’t—”

“You what?”

“I went to see him. Wanted to know if he was the jealous type.”

“And?”

“He’s already with someone else. And…” I immediately wish I hadn’t said that, but I know why I did.

“Yeah?”

“Never mind.”

“Tell me.”

“He claimed he was seeing this other girl and you at the same time.” I expect tears from this revelation.

Helen shrugs. “I’m not exactly surprised. I had myself tested the week after I left him, and I was shocked to find out my twat was clean as a whistle.”

“Theo didn’t strike me as bright enough to make it look like a suicide. That true?”

“Very true. If he did it, it would’ve been impulsive and sloppy. A crime of passion, something Theo doesn’t have. He cared about me, but only the way you’d care about a car or a big screen TV.”

“Anyone else come to mind? Someone who hated Ron, or maybe someone Ron hated?”

“Not enough to even spit at him. Refill on that OJ, tough guy?”

I nod. Helen grabs my cup and heads into the kitchen.

Her voice echoes from behind the refrigerator door. “Ron didn’t betray people. He had no money. I doubt he got mixed up in something shady. Maybe it was just some nut who did it because he saw it written in his alphabet soup.”

“I don’t think nuts make it look like suicide. They either don’t care who knows what they did, or they think they’re serving God and want their handiwork out in the open to spread their ‘message.’”

She hands me my orange juice. “You’ve really thought a lot about this, huh?”

“Not much else worth thinking about lately.”

She sits sideways on the couch and puts her legs across my lap. Her bare feet bounce gently next to my left hand. She has beautiful feet, prettier than my hands. Like her fingernails they’re not painted, but pedicured. They smell like peppermint lotion.

“Did Ron keep a journal?” I playfully pat her feet. “You should put on some socks. Your feet are freezing.”

“I like them cold. I get overheated easily. I don’t think he kept a journal. He had that blog, but that was all silly stuff and those indecipherable haikus.”

I laugh, remembering. “Do you think Ron’s mom would let you go through his room? You could tell her there are some pictures that you want or whatever.”

“I don’t need an excuse. She’d let me. What would I be looking for?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You should come with me.”

“I can’t. Don’t mention me, or what we think.”

She raises an eyebrow.

“I told her my theory. She called me a retard.” I endure a long laugh at my expense.

“Sorry. I just—you gotta love Mrs. T.”

* * *

After hours sitting beside Helen’s cold pretty feet talking about Ron and any other topic that comes up, I say it’s getting late and I should get going.

Helen sits up on her knees and presses her nose to my cheek. Her nose is as cold as her feet. “Stay over.”

“I don’t have a change of clothes. Toothbrush.”

“I need a snuggle partner. I won’t try anything, I promise.”

“That makes me less likely to stay. I need my migraine medicine. I’ll never make it to work on time tomorrow.”

“I’ll sleep in a beater and panties.”

“I’m in.”

* * *

Oh, her body in that beater. Her legs. She wears pastel blue panties with cartoon beavers all over them. I can see the faint outline of her nipples through her shirt. I sleep on my back with her curled up next to me. Her head is on my shoulder. The strawberry smell of her hair right under my nose. Her leg on top of my leg.

My schvance is so fully engorged the entire night that I swear it’s twitching in time with my heartbeat. But all that happens is a goodnight kiss on the cheek and then sleeping.

Neither one of us wants to betray Ron.

And without saying it, we both know we won’t be able to hold out very long. It’s just too lonely without him.

I have all of my packages delivered to work because my apartment mailbox is tiny. A guy from the mailroom drops off the box that contains my sleuthing manual.

The book, red with gold letters, is my shiny new bible.
An Introduction To Investigation
. Tucked under one of my work articles, I savor every word of this how-to tome. I finish reading most of it by the end of the day. I even read the foreword and preface.

I don’t learn a lot from the book. Most of it has nothing to do with murder. But I do learn that there isn’t much to learn. Most of investigating is common sense, rational thought, observation, and thorough analysis. Easy to grasp, difficult to master.

Some of the things I learn are counterintuitive, though, and I really need to beat them into my skull. The first of these is that
why
is the always last question of an investigation, and usually the least important one.
Why
was the second question I asked in my investigation;
who
was the first.

According to the book, the Private Investigator Act makes it illegal for a person to perform the duties of a private investigator without a license. Since I don’t plan on paying myself for my services, that’s not an issue. My work ethic will be professional, my status amateur.

A detective’s description of a person or vehicle is called a “portrait parle.” For a person, this is, in order: gender, ethnicity, hair color, eye color, age, height, and weight. For a car: VIN number, license plate number, make, model, and color. I have no way of getting VIN numbers, so even though it’s ranked first, it’s a non-factor for me.

Apparently, a good deal of private investigation revolves around the workplace. It usually deals with employee theft and embezzlement, drug use at work, security lapses, and lack of supervision. Not murder.

I learn that an investigator should never assume.

A professional private eye lives and dies by his report. This is the product he gives to his clients, the tangible proof that his services have been worth the cost. I need to be able to quickly examine a room, a face, or an object, retain that information, and write it down as soon as possible.

Typical tools of the trade are as follows: a camcorder, a 35 mm camera with a 200 mm zoom lens, a voice-activated tape recorder, binoculars (7 x 35, or 10 x 50 for wider areas; I have no clue what those numbers represent), an infrared scope for night vision, and a parabolic receiver for listening from a distance.

Though completely unrelated to my case, I learn this nifty trick if you want to obtain a new birth certificate to change your identity: find the obituaries from the year you were born; find the name of a dead infant who was born in one state and died in another (it makes cross-referencing harder for the office that receives your application for the new certificate); write down the deceased’s name, the name of both parents, and the place of birth; apply for a new birth certificate; and finally, soak it in coffee and dry it in the sun to make it look aged.

I learn that the legal difference between an interview and an interrogation is that in an interrogation, the person being questioned doesn’t have the freedom to leave.

You can’t tape a conversation with someone without his or her knowledge, but you don’t need consent. So I guess you can pull out a tape recorder and say, “I’m gonna tape this.” And if the other person says, “Fuck no!” you can say, “Whatever. You
know
now. That’s all that matters.” The only time you can record a conversation without the other person’s knowledge is if you can prove that your job or safety is at risk.

And the last tidbit from the book: all human beings have four unique physical identifiers: DNA, pupils, teeth marks, and fingerprints. Pupils are news to me.

Despite being a novice, I already have a staff in the form of one very attractive unpaid intern. I think about Helen all day. Spending the night with her pressed against me was worth getting up at six in the morning, running out before she could glimpse my male-pattern Mohawk sleepyhead or smell my acrid morning breath, driving forty-five minutes back to my place to shower and get dressed, and driving a half-hour to work. It was also worth the throb I felt in my head by lunch from not taking my migraine pill before bed, psychosomatic or not.

I would want Helen if I had met her under normal circumstances. She’s nice-looking, confident, and interesting. If she were my girlfriend’s friend, my coworker, my therapist, I would want her. But the fact that I can’t have her—or at least shouldn’t—makes my lust all-consuming.

Despite being mostly undisciplined and lazy, I’ve always had the ability to lock in on my desire for one girl. The only time I’m truly monogamous in my actions and intentions is when I want one girl and haven’t gotten her yet. Eve could come into my cube right now begging me to defile her and I’d shrug her off. Every time I close my eyes, I see Helen’s smile, her cold feet, her thick, toned thighs, her long blonde hair curled around her ears. My nostrils keep thinking they smell strawberries.

* * *

Helen calls Ron’s mother that night and asks if she can look through Ron’s stuff for some pictures. Ron’s mother leaves a key in her mailbox the next morning. I give Helen directions to my apartment and tell her to drive to me right from Ron’s.

The day before Helen went to look through Ron’s bedroom, I cleaned my apartment the way most guys clean. I put things away, straightened up, cleaned the bathroom and the kitchen, vacuumed only where I could see hair and lint, and didn’t dust at all. I doused the apartment in air freshener and lit a vanilla candle in the kitchen to cover the perpetual funk created from a few years of waiting until food turned blue, green, or black before throwing it out. And I changed the sheets.

I put
Introduction to Investigation
on a dinner tray in front of my couch, along with my notes about the scene of the crime and newspaper articles about Ron’s death. Despite having spent my night watching four episodes of
What’s Happening Now!
and eating Stella Doro Breakfast Treats, when Helen gets here it looks like I was hard at work trying to crack the case