Cube Sleuth (9 page)

I want to say he didn’t do it. That he was murdered and we both probably know the killer. I’m going to find him and get revenge. “He was bipolar.”

“Sad disease. Don’t seem fair. Young boy like that.”

My lip starts to tremble. I thank her again and slip away. I only have to walk twenty feet before I can hide my tears in my cube. As I come around the corner, I see Keith walking toward me. Chances are he’s snooping around to see why I’m not at my station right now, slaving away.

“Hi, Bobby.” Keith smiles warmly. His smooth, bald head shines under the fluorescent lights. His suit looks pristine, as always.

“How you doing, Keith?” My voice sounds crisp, so I hope Keith won’t notice I’m upset.

“Everything OK?” So much for that.

“Yep. I just had a sneezing fit, so my eyes are all watery. Probably inhaled some dust or something.”

“You allergic?”

“Very.” That’s actually true.

“All right. Have a good day then.”

I wipe my eyes. “You, too.”

Keith irks me to no end. Sometimes it’s the big stuff, like stalking me to find out why I left my desk, and then pretending to actually care about me and not just productivity. His fake concern is like a dorky girl’s exaggerated laugh at a hot guy’s lame joke. He fills a socializing quota each day and then goes back to quantifying the universe. Sometimes it’s the little stuff, like how he says “Have a good day,” knowing he’ll see me at least twice more that day. (He never leaves before I do, probably just to make sure I don’t leave early.) He reminds me of a doll with six rotating phrases to say when you pull his string.

Sitting at my desk having a mental rant about Keith’s façade of humanity, I stare at the notes I just took. One or more windows were open and music was playing in Ron’s Jeep. That was all Beatrice had given me, and I doubt she held anything back. This is hopeless.

I already feel desperate. I need a direction. If the killer works with me, where is a good place to start looking? The people closest to me were almost surely the people Ron knew best. But maybe the killer is someone Ron met in the lunchroom, or at Toastmasters, the public speaking group. Eventually, I’ll have to look at anyone who could be suspicious, but for—

I feel pressure on the back of my head. At the same time, I feel the cool edge of a tiny blade pressed to the edge of my Adam’s apple. I tense for a second, then relax and let out an annoyed sigh. I feel Cody’s tall, wide frame behind me, see his shadow on my desk.

“I could’ve killed you,” he says with his usual gravity. He keeps me in his sleeper hold, his warm man-breath molesting my right ear.

“Why don’t you? You’d be doing me a favor.”

Cody lets go of me, sits on the edge of my desk, and plants his hand on my shoulder. “Why are you talking like that, son? What’s wrong?” Despite being only eight years older than me, he always feels compelled to call me
son
. I hate that.

“I don’t know. Maybe because being dead would mean not working here anymore.”

“So quit. You can find some—”

“Not in the mood right now, Cody. Not in the mood.”

Cody looks around my cube in disgust. “How can you find anything in this mess? Looks like the inside of a homeless guy’s refrigerator-box house.”

“My memory is very spatial. Plus, Keith hates a messy cube, so it’s kinda me biting my thumb at him.”

“Pretty juvenile, son. And passive aggressive.”

“How about I punch you as hard as I can in your stupid dick? That active aggressive enough for you?”

He looks in my eyes, scratching his auburn mustache thoughtfully. “Guy tries to attack you. He’s bigger, stronger. Maybe he knows how to fight. He has the advantage. Where do you strike?”

“Cody, I…”

“Where do you strike? How do you try to get the upper hand?’

“I don’t know.”

“Your life could depend on it. Maybe he’s nuts, thinks you raped his girlfriend.” Cody is the only person at Paine-Skidder who surpasses me in inappropriate work conversation.

“His balls, I guess. I’d kick him in his hairy sack. I’d pretend he was you.”

“Not bad. Definitely a vulnerable spot. But there’s a better play to make. Want another guess?”

“I do not. No. Not at all.”

Cody raises his left hand and slowly karate chops at my throat, stopping just as his fingers touch my skin “The windpipe. You chop right there, cut off his air supply. He’s helpless. His senses shut down for a few seconds. His whole existence becomes ‘I can’t breath.’ Then you take him down.”

“Couldn’t I kill him like that? Crush his windpipe?”

“If you did it too hard, sure. But I doubt that’d be an issue for you, son.” He winks at me. If I didn’t think I would die in the retaliation, I would chop his obnoxious windpipe right here and now.

“I have work to do.” I put on my best poker face.

Cody laughs. “Good one. Hey, you see the new intern in production? Her grill is nothing to write home about, but she has this thick, juicy, wide ass that’s just screaming, ‘Tongue me! Tongue me!’”

“Tongue me, Cody? Really?”

“I think she’s Puerto Rican. Her last name ends in ‘quez.’”

“She’s nineteen.”

“Legal age of consent in PA is sixteen.”

“You should hang out at the DMV. Get ‘em the day they’re legal.”

“You’ll be my successor one day, son. You’re a visionary.” He pats my shoulder like a proud father and leaves me to the work he knows I have no intention of doing.

Cody isn’t stupid. He recognizes my sarcasm, but I think he ignores it or writes it off as me denying my fate. I represent his legacy, the son he never had, or at least didn’t know he had. He refuses to see how I look at him: a personification of my worst impulses, my libido with a Yosemite Sam mustache.

He seems harmless enough, but I know he has guns, know he loves pretending to kill me. He never actually killed anyone; if he’d seen any real action in the Marines, I’d have heard about it in great detail. But he was trained for it. He has it in him. He got along with Ron as far as I know, but on my list of work suspects, he’s the best place to start.

Cody Heet’s portrait parle: male, Caucasian, auburn hair, blue eyes, mid-thirties, about 6′2″, around 200 lbs. Thick mustache that hangs a little past the edge of his upper lip. Round, out-of-style glasses with brown marble rims. He told me once where he grew up, but I forget. Chicago, maybe.

Cody is a former Marine, but isn’t all gung-ho and Semper Fi. He once taught me the proper way to salute: arm rigidly bent at ninety degrees, hand flat and straight, tip of my pointer finger touching the corner of the rim of my glasses, my hand lifted before his and not lowered until after he lowers his to show my respect to a superior. The fact that he lets me salute him in the halls is proof he isn’t a hardcore Marine; a salute from a flabby civilian like me would anger a zealous Jarhead.

In his three years at Paine-Skidder, Cody has slept with five coworkers. Two were married. All five affairs lasted less than two months. None of the women spoke to Cody once the affair was over. He must have some charm behind the slimy lechery, because he surely garnered a reputation after the second or third woman. Stella Kruger must’ve known all about his M.O. I’m sure she got the warning out on Cody. He
is
extremely polite to women and his higher-ups, something he learned back home or in the Corp. Everything is “please” and “thank you.” Everyone is “sir” or “ma’am.”
Ladies first. Let me get that door for you
. I guess women eat it up.

Cody loves to share the dirty details about each woman he’s slept with.
This one has a bush like a square foot of black Astroturf. This one couldn’t come without two fingers up her ass. This one shaved her pubes into a V, made her pussy look like a heavy metal guitar. This one’s a squirter. This one calls me Dad; not Daddy, Dad
. I’d see one of these women in the hall and chat with them, and no matter how hard I tried, my mind kept repeating,
this one has inch-long nipples like highlighter caps
.

I really try to despise Cody. I also want to sleep with a lot of women, but he really objectifies them. I want variety; he just wants another scalp for his belt. But in the end, I don’t despise him. He’s repulsive, but he’s also pure entertainment. A human caricature. Our conversations help me understand why women love reading tabloids.

Cody comes in and leaves work an hour before me each day, so I don’t know what kind of car he drives or which level he parks on. Time for another lame ruse.

I stand in front of the wall of windows at the end of the hall leading to the elevators. I pretend to enjoy the view or check on the weather. At a certain angle, the window reflects the hall behind me, so I try to look natural while keeping my body stiffly aligned in this position. It’s 4:25 p.m. Cody finishes at 4:30.

Twice I turn when I see someone floating through the reflection, looking like a ghost walking three stories above the Schuylkill River, but both times the person isn’t Cody. I look down at my cell phone at exactly 4:30, and then I see Cody’s reflection swaggering over the river on his way to the elevator. I count to five in my head, then turn and rush to the elevators, asking Cody to hold the door for me.

As the doors close in front of us, Cody glances down and sees my keys in my hand. “Headin’ out early?”

“Left my wallet in the car. I want to buy this CD online and I need my credit card number.”

“What CD?”

I try to think of a CD he likes. “Uh.
Murmur
.”

“R.E.M., nice. Who turned you on to that?”

The elevators open at the lobby and we exit to get into another elevator that goes to the parking garage. For security reasons, the outer two elevators only go from the lobby to the fourth floor, and the center elevator only goes from the lobby to P3, so that everyone has to pass through the lobby and be seen by the receptionist before 5:00 p.m. and the security guard after that. Of course, the receptionist and security guard never look up at you unless you walk up and ask them a question.

Heading into the center elevator, I make up a human being to answer Cody’s question. “My cousin Vinny got me into them.” This is worse than telling Eve she was a pretty woman, but Cody doesn’t seem to notice.

Cody presses P3. “Where you going?”

“P3 too.” The parking garage is small, so if Cody doesn’t hop right into his car and peel out immediately, I’m going to look like a moron.

Cody doesn’t hop right into his car, doesn’t peel out immediately, and I do look like a moron walking around pantomiming confusion.

As he pulls out of his spot, he rolls down his window. “Forget what your car looks like?”

“I forgot where I parked. Maybe I parked on two today.”

“Might want to invest in some ginkgo biloba.” Cody winks at me and screeches up the exit ramp in his black 1970s Trans Am with a big gold bird stenciled on the hood. I catch the first three letters of his license plate: LMK.

Back at my desk, I look through pictures online until I find his exact Trans Am.

The portrait parle for Cody’s car: VIN ?????, license plate LMK????, Pontiac, 1978 Trans Am, Black.

Now I have to figure out how to tail Cody home without being spotted. Cars can’t be parked on the lane outside Paine-Skidder’s underground parking garage, so I can’t sit inconspicuously in a row of parked cars and pull out after him. If I try following him from the garage, he’ll spot me in his mirror after a few minutes.

It’ll be better for me to get his home address and tail him from his house. So it’s back to
whitepages.com
. I write Cody’s address in the tiny notebook where I wrote the portrait parle for him and his car, a pocket-sized hunter green pad with a flimsy spiral binding across the top. I plan to keep it in my back pocket at all times with a blue Bic pen slid through its spiral, to whip out whenever I need to quickly jot down an important clue. I can’t wear a trench coat, a fedora, or a holstered pistol, so this notebook constitutes my entire detective uniform.

I wait impatiently for Keith to leave for the day so I can look through Cody’s office. I keep an article on my screen but look bored. Keith usually just says goodnight by the door to the stairwell if I look unproductive. If he sees me being industrious, rushing to finish an important project, he stops by to shoot the shit. Like he wants to make me stay just a little bit later. Seriously, the guy kills me.

My plan works, and I mumble a goodnight to Keith as he opens the stairwell door. I wait five minutes to make sure he doesn’t come back to grab something he forgot, then sneak into Cody’s cube. On my way, I spin slowly, surveying the grid of cubes for the janitor’s red baseball cap. The cap is nowhere in sight and I can hear the janitor scatting in falsetto on the other side of the floor, so I know I have plenty of time.

The janitor is Lionel, a man in his seventies who wears a light blue denim shirt, navy blue overalls, tan work boots, and a red baseball cap every day. He hums old jazz music or scats while he empties the trash. Since his work begins after five o’clock, I’m one of the few people who sees Lionel regularly. We’ve had dozens of conversations, but his thick Louisiana accent and chewing tobacco-filled mouth make him incoherent. I call him Mumbles (not to his face). I’ve learned when to nod, when to say “Yeah” or “Whattya gonna do, right?” or “Me too,” and to laugh whenever he laughs. He talks about the Eagles, how he had twenty-three girlfriends when he was my age, how he got shot in the leg at work in his thirties, and I can usually pick up enough keywords to get the gist. In the middle of a sentence, he’ll pause to droop a thick glob of chaw into my trashcan, which he holds under his chin like an ash tray.

Mumbles is always smiling, always singing. Probably ten years past retirement, his job consists of picking up other people’s trash, and he is the only person at Paine-Skidder that I consider genuinely happy. You know your career is in bad shape when you find yourself wishing you were the janitor.

I walk casually into Cody’s cube, my heart pounding.

In movies, when people look through someone else’s files, it usually cuts to the person the files belong to as they head back to their office. Cut back to the guy looking through the files and saying “Shit! Where is it?” Then back to the guy heading toward his office, then stopping to talk to someone. Back to the snooper, “Got it!” Back to the guy getting close to his office door. Snooper slips the file into his jacket, hearing the door click. The guy enters and looks suspiciously around his empty office. The snooper is under the desk (dumbest place to hide ever), holding his breath. The guy turns on the light. We think the snooper is about to get caught, but the guy’s secretary calls for him, and he leaves. The snooper lets out his breath in a sigh, and so do we.