Cube Sleuth

by David Terruso

  “I’m gonna kill him, Helen. I might literally kill him.” I crouch down and dig under my bed for my little league bat.

  “You don’t get it.” Her voice is uncharacteristically sweet.

  “What’s to get? He beat the shit out of you, and I’m gonna crack his hick skull open and see if there’s actually anything in there.”

  “He didn’t beat me up.”

  “Oh, was it just some new karate where you ram your torso into the guy’s fists?”

  “I fucked him, Bobby.”

  I roll onto my back and glare up at her, gripping my bat.

  “I went to see him. I wanted… He’s rough. I needed that. You can’t…” She sits on the bed and pats the bruises through her shirt. “In the middle of it, he got carried away. Guess he wanted to get back at me for leaving him.”

  She sounds so matter of fact that I want to punch her. “I could be rough if I knew that’s what—”

  “It doesn’t work if I have to tell you. It just has to come out.”

  I pace in the living room with the bat in my hand. Helen sits on my bed in silence. My rage builds. Rage because Theo cracked my girl’s ribs. Because she isn’t my girl, never was and never will be. Because I’m not good enough for her, can’t satisfy her. I feel small. “Are you back with him now?” I stand in the bedroom doorway, patting the bat in my left palm.

  “We’re done for good. Don’t do anything stupid.”

  She doesn’t say she’s sorry. I stare at her and understand that she isn’t sorry. She has no loyalty to me, so she can’t really betray me. She doesn’t love me. And I don’t love her, because I’m not hurt. Just jealous.

  One thing Helen and I have in common that doesn’t involve the R-word is that we don’t need anyone but ourselves to punish us for our sins.

  “You can leave now.”

  “Bobby.”

  “Look around and get whatever’s yours.”

  “Bobby.”

  “It was fun while it lasted, but I’m glad it’s done. We can stop using each other as Ron-fillers now. I’m not Ron. You’re not Ron. I’ll always be Ron’s friend to you. You’ll always be Ron’s girl to me. I deserve a beating worse than yours for trying to steal you from him, even if he’s gone. I’m despicable. And you’re a piece of shit. We deserved each other, and now we deserve to be alone.”

  “Bobby…”

  “If I get arrested for what I do to Theo, you better testify for me. You owe me that.”

  “You’re all talk.”

  “Hope so.”

  “You come at him, he’ll shoot you. Bat versus gun isn’t a fair fight.”

  “I better get a gun, then.”

  Helen smirks. “Bobby, can we…?”

  “Get your stuff and get out. You have ten minutes. I’ll help you find it all if you can’t bend down.”

  Helen’s face contorts like she’s about to cry. She ducks into the bathroom.

  I throw her shirts, bracelets, and DVDs into a trash bag and leave it by the door.

  I lie on my couch absorbed in the final act of Old Boy when Helen drops her overnight bag beside the trash bag. She stands by the door with her arms folded and watches me cover my mouth in shock as I find out why the movie’s protagonist, Oh Dae-su, has been locked up for fifteen years.

  Helen steps beside the TV. “Can we talk a little?”

  “Go home. I’m watching this. You should rent it and watch the ending. It’s blowing my mind here.”

  She moves in front of the TV. I sit up and pause the DVD. She kneels in front of me and looks up at me like a little girl. “Don’t let me leave like this. We’re friends. We need each other.”

  I let a tiny smile sneak through my scowl and I pat her head. “Is Theo right-handed or left-handed?”

  “Right. Why?”

  “So I know which hand to break.”

  * * *

  Alone in my apartment, I watch the credits drag across the screen. Old Boy is about the destructive power of revenge. By the end, the main characters are ruined in body and spirit. With a bat resting at my feet, perhaps that’s a message I should be contemplating.

  But I don’t dwell on it. Instead, I think about the scene where Oh Dae-su uses the claw end of a hammer to extract one tooth for every year of his captivity from the man who kept him locked up. I then replay the scene where Oh-Dae-su defeats more than a dozen men at once with the same hammer.

  I decide to strike while the jealousy is hot; attack Theo before I lose my nerve. Besides, I’m lonely now. What better do I have to do?

  * * *

  “If you ever touch her again, I’ll cut your hand off.” Resting the bat on my shoulder like a home run hitter, I turn and walk toward my car.

  Theo’s neighbor’s porch light comes on. An old man in pajama bottoms with a hairless potbelly waddles onto the porch, shotgun in hand. A pony-sized Rottweiler hunkers down the steps in front of me.

  Theo shouts after me, “You’re dead. You’re fucking dead. I’m gonna find you and blow your head off! I swear to fucking God.”

  I make eye contact with the old man as he levels the shotgun at me. I duck into a thicket of trees and run like hell.

  Even though this old man might shoot me or his dog might swallow me whole, Theo’s threat is what scares me. I went overboard with his hand, and he owns a lot of guns. What the hell was I thinking? His hand will be in a cast, his bones held together with pins and screws, and he’ll spend his recuperation plotting my demise.

  I make it to my car, surprised by my incredible speed. As I start the engine, a shotgun blast screams from behind me and blows a crater in a nearby tree. In my rearview mirror, I can see the old man marching toward my car, shotgun raised. His pony dog is far ahead of him, almost to my rear bumper. I peel out in a wide circle that momentarily puts my tires in a ditch on the other side of the road, then speed off before the old man can get a look at my license plate.

  And to think I was afraid of cougars, monkeys, and emus.

  * * *

  Driving home, my brain fills with different scenarios of how Theo will kill me.

  I walk to my car one day and find the windows smashed. I take out my cell phone to call the cops and Theo pops up from behind a parked car and blows my head clean off with his shotgun.

  I get up in the morning, groggily brush my teeth. I open my shower curtain and find Theo aiming a pistol with a silencer on it at my throat. With a quiet peowww, the bullet slices through my neck and comes out the back, breaking the bathroom mirror. Theo watches with a crazed grin while I lie there gurgling, hands over my throat, blood flowing between my fingers.

  But unless the old man did somehow see my license plate, Theo knows nothing about me but my first name and that I was Ron’s friend. I don’t think he even knows I worked with Ron.

  The only way he can find out my whereabouts is by beating them out of Helen. That is, unfortunately, a distinct possibility.

  Unless he finds Ron’s blog and it mentions me.

  Or the Not For Mixed Company website.

  Shit. He’s gonna find me. And I’m gonna die.

  PART THREE

  Chapter 19

  I Told You So

  The sunlight burns my eyes when I fling open the door to the outside. I run past the adjacent office building, huffing and puffing. I picture my personal trainer jogging beside me with a disappointed frown.

  As soon as the bridge comes into view, I see all the lanes in both directions filled with stopped cars. I see an ambulance trying to wedge its way onto the bridge. A half-dozen onlookers stare over the rail, their faces too small to see their expressions. I follow their line of sight down to where Eve’s mangled body lies across the rocks in this shallow part of the Schuylkill. Blood and tissue droop from Eve’s temple onto the rock beneath her head. I see a flash of the three-dimensional stains inside Ron’s Jeep.

  I climb down the steep bank and enter the river under the bridge. The water comes up to my knees. The current is very strong and I fall
twice before I reach Eve’s body. I refuse to accept the idea that she’s dead. You couldn’t get her brain back into her head with a shoehorn, and I’m crouched over her feeling for a pulse.

  My pants are covered in mud, my hands in blood. My clothes are soaked through. I want to cry, but can barely breathe. I take off my dress shirt and drape it over Eve’s face.

  Cops and EMTs with a gurney scurry down the steps of the bridge as I sit down on a rock beside Eve’s fresh corpse. The cold river water, the same color as the leak in my apartment, pulses through my pants and tries with every surge to pull me into the stream. I sway forward again and again to keep myself upright.

  My thoughts disconnect.

  My body grieves but my mind tells me to be relieved.

  I knew something terrible was going to happen; I should just be glad it happened through Eve and not directly to me.

  It’s not like she wanted anything to do with me anyways; I haven’t even lost a friend.

  My mind tells me that I should feel triumphant. This is the I-told-you-so of a lifetime. Everyone was wrong except me.

  Eve dies three months after Ron’s death, a month after I smash Theo’s hand, and less than a month before I get my Five Years of Service Award.

  However, several important things happened between the day I have batting practice at Theo’s and the day Eve takes her final walk across the Fayette Street Bridge.

  Let me get you up to speed.

  Chapter 20

  Why Can’t It Be a Woman?

  The day after I use Theo as a piñata, I tell people at work that the bruise on my cheek came from my encounter I had with a mugger. I saw the mugger taking an old lady’s purse from across the street. I walked toward them yelling “Stop!” in the hopes that he’d run away. Instead, he ran right into me, purse in hand, and elbowed me in the face. He made off with granny’s loot.

  I figure that if I fail comically in my story, people will be more likely to believe it. It works. The pats on the back from friends make me uncomfortable. One person calls me a demi-hero, a term I hope will catch on.

  My mom rewards me for my heroics with Duncan Hines yellow cupcakes. To the despicable liar go the spoils. The guilt I feel eating them doesn’t diminish their deliciousness. You wouldn’t think that cake named for its color instead of its flavor could be the culinary delight that it is.

  Helen has left me a bunch of voicemails since I kicked her out of my apartment, begging me to give her another chance. In one message, she sounds like she’s crying. It tickles me to see this side of her. I feel powerful. She texts me I LOVE YOU twice a day for a week. I don’t respond.

  When she texts with THEO TOLD ME WHAT YOU DID. YOU’RE DUMB AND CRAZY, BUT THANKS, I text back YOU’RE WELCOME.

  Unless Theo calls the cops or gets some friends after me, I won’t have to deal with him until his hand heals. It took mine hand six weeks to recover; Theo probably had emergency surgery and will need twice as long. After a week, I stop taking my bat with me to my car, stop jabbing the bat into the shower curtain before I open it.

  In the lonely days after banishing Helen, I think about Nancy a lot. Helen cheating on me with Theo helped me fully understand how much I hurt Nancy. I understood the betrayal, but now I know the true pain of being cheated on: the unshakeable notion that you’re not as good as the person your partner turned to for whatever you lack. Since you’re unlikely to get an honest answer from the cheater about this lack, you start to doubt everything about yourself:

  I’m too short, too balding, too pale, too plain, too paunchy. I’m not muscular. I’m not social enough. I have hairy toes. My breath stinks when I wake up. I get pimples on my back and butt. I have an overbite. I don’t know anything about politics or current events. I curse too much and say inappropriate things in delicate situations. I’m moody and reclusive. I lie too easily. I avoid confrontation, take the easy way out. I don’t make enough money. I have poker debt. I have a temper. I have no direction in life, no ambition. When people tell me about their problems, I drift off unless the story is really, really interesting. I have a wandering eye. I’m much nicer to women I want to sleep with. I make fun of people too much. I sleep too much. I masturbate too much. I’m lazy. I fart all day long. I’m too picky about food. I’m allergic to dust, cat hair, dog hair, pollen. I’m lactose intolerant. I have chronic migraines. I repeat my jokes to as many people as will listen. I think I’m better than other people. I haven’t prayed in years, unless I need something. I never go to church. My vocabulary is too small, particularly for an editor. I’ve never traveled outside the continental United States. I don’t speak any foreign languages. I have a weak chin. My hands are veiny. My voice is scratchy. I don’t know how to smile in pictures. I’m claustrophobic. I’m cranky when I’m sick. I don’t clean my apartment enough. I never give 100% to anything. I can’t write. I talk too fast. I wear the same four outfits over and over. I’m a quitter. I do everything I can to avoid the consequences of my actions. I’m a terrible amateur detective.

  Thoughts like these will stick in your mind the way gum sticks to hair. Nancy had it worse than I do because she gave me years of her life and all the sacrifices that go along with a relationship; I was only with Helen for a few weeks.

  To deal with my guilt, I send Nancy a dozen red roses with a note: I’M SORRY FOR CHEATING AND ALL THE OTHER THINGS I DID WRONG. YOU TREATED ME BETTER THAN ANYONE EVER HAS. YOU DESERVED ROSES FROM ME ALL THE TIME AND NEVER GOT ANY. I LOVE YOU. I HOPE YOU’RE HAPPY AND HAVE SOMEONE WHO TREATS YOU HOW YOU TREATED ME. LOVE, BOBBY.

  I send the flowers to her townhouse at St. Joe’s, remembering that she’s only days from graduation. I feel bad about not being there to see her walk.

  * * *

  I sit in my cube with my little green notebook filled with facts and theories about Ron, and various loose papers with notes, questions, crude drawings of the crime scene, etc.

  I have a new theory about the killer being able to fire a second shot from Ron’s hand and not worrying about the bullet leaving a hole: maybe he aimed the gun at a block of ballistics gel. I find a website that explains how to make the gel at home. I believe the killer wasn’t parked in the lot when he walked up to Ron, so sneaking around with a big block of ballistics gel in a container is a bit of stretch, but still possible.

  Reviewing the notes from my discussion with Capillo, I keep rereading what he said about the suicide note: RON TYPED NOTE FROM HIS COMPUTER, PRINTED FROM HIS DESK, SIGNED IT. HANDWRITING ANALYSIS CONCLUSIVE. I know this is the clue I need to focus on.

  I’m dying to know how the note was worded. I doubt the killer could replicate Ron’s comically stilted and bizarre writing rhythms unless he’d read Ron’s blog. Regardless, the fact that the note was typed from Ron’s computer proves the killer works for Paine-Skidder.

  Only Paine-Skidder employees can get through the lobby without a visitor pass—but since the receptionist and security guard almost never look up, an outsider sneaking in isn’t out of the question. As far as I know, Ron didn’t have any visitors. The killer breaking into the building the night before to print the note doesn’t work because the time it was printed would be saved in the system.

  Ron was an artist; his suicide note would be a personal expression. It would be handwritten. The killer must’ve gotten Ron to sign some bogus work form, and Ron didn’t realize that the paper he was signing was actually a blank piece of printer paper taped behind the form. Then the killer just had to login to Ron’s computer (did he have Ron’s password? System administrator privileges?), type the note, and slip the signed paper into Ron’s printer to print it.

  The IT department probably has a record of all of the logins on every computer in the building, as well as what usernames and passwords are used. But I have no way of accessing that information.

  Who would Ron sign something for? Maybe an HR form, a package from the mailroom, an attendance sheet for Suzanne? Maybe the attendance sheet from a Toastmaster’s meeting—but it would be u
nlikely to get Ron to sign that in one specific corner.

  * * *

  I ask our receptionist Nina if she remembers Ron ever having a visitor. She eyes me suspiciously, glances around the lobby. “Why are you asking me this?”

  “I’m writing a story about Ron.”

  Nina’s tiny, round, brown glasses and the two tips in the front of her coif make her look like The Wise Owl. “What good would knowing whether or not he had visitors do for your story?”

  I stare at her for a few seconds before settling on the vague “It’s personal.”

  She cocks an eyebrow.

  “So. Did he have any visitors?” I try a stern tone because I fear I’m losing her.

  “Uhhhhh…” Her eyes drift up as she thinks back. “Once. A pretty girl with dirty blonde hair. She went up to see his cube.”

  I wonder why Ron would have Helen up to his cube and not introduce me to her. I guess I was out sick that day. “When was that?”

  “Shit, I don’t know. Probably a year ago.” Only Paine-Skidder would hire a woman as their receptionist who starts sentences with “shit.”

  “She was the only one? You sure?”

  “I think.”

  “You remember her name?”

  “Nope.”

  “Helen sound familiar?”

  “Nope. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t it. It was a long time ago.”

  I leave Nina the Owl to her game of Free Cell, resisting the urge to ask her how many licks it takes to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop.

  * * *

  I email Helen to see if and when she came to visit Ron. She tells me it was when Ron had been at Paine-Skidder less than a month, so the receptionist’s time frame was accurate. Even if Helen visited Ron right before his death, she isn’t a suspect, so it doesn’t matter.

  But why isn’t she a suspect? I locked myself into thinking the killer is a man for no reason. Why can’t it be a woman? Why can’t it be Helen? She loved Ron and he loved her, but she claimed to love me, too, and look how well that ended. Years of Theo’s abuse clearly warped her idea of “love.”