Cube Sleuth (3 page)

I have chronic migraines and sleep is the best medicine for them. I’m a night person and usually stay up until my second wind. In the morning, I lie in bed hitting the snooze a dozen times. Yes, my head sometimes hurts, but usually I stay in bed too long because getting up means going to work.

Ron died the day after Valentine’s Day. I’m twenty minutes late the morning of his death. I park on P2 as usual, wondering why it’s so hard to find a spot that morning when that level is usually half empty.

I run up to my cube, out of breath by the time I get there. I expect to find a note from my supervisor Suzanne that says
PLEASE STOP IN
, but there isn’t one. After fifteen minutes, I walk around and see that my entire department is missing.

Figuring I had missed a meeting, I check my calendar reminders and emails. I find nothing, so I pretend to look busy and hope Suzanne will buy that I missed whatever I’m missing because I’ve been trying to finish up something important. Hopefully she won’t realize that
nothing
at Paine-Skidder is “important.”

I hear footsteps behind me and start typing nonsense to look productive. Usually Suzanne knocks on my cube with this jaunty, “howdy-neighbor!” rap. This time she says my name in the same soft voice my mother used when I was a child to wake me up.

I spin around in my chair with my standard fake enthusiasm, my I-love-a-challenge-what’s-my-next-assignment face. My expression fades when I see that Suzanne has been crying.

“Can you come with me?”

I nod. My first thought is that the whole department is being laid off. My dream come true: a severance package, six months of unemployment, and waking up at noon every single blessed day.

The meeting room is a hundred feet from my cube, and as I get close to the door, I hear sobbing. I step into the room and quickly scan the seats for Ron. He’s the only one not there. I figure he must be very sick because he never misses work. Usually I sit next to him in meetings so we can have facial-expression conversations whenever something ridiculous happens.

I take the only open seat. It’s beside Harry Brody, which is no surprise. Harry is the social pariah of our department, and possibly of the whole company. He somehow combines complete incompetence and boring conversation with rude behavior and fundamentalist religious views. He also has twin squirrel tails growing under his red nose that look like they belong with the pictures I have up in my cube from The Handlebar Moustache Club website. As Harry’s face-fur grows, everyone’s hatred for him grows with it.

Harry’s big stupid face holds its usual mix of confusion and bewilderment. Whatever news I’m about to get has spread through the Paine-Skidder rumor mill like chicken pox in kindergarten, leaving Harry out of the loop as usual. I know from how people look and how hard they’re crying that this is not about lay-offs. Someone died.

My boss Keith Rell stands as I take my seat. He rubs his red eyes and clears his throat. His deep voice, which usually enunciates everything perfectly and makes him sound like a commercial voiceover, cracks when he speaks. “I know most of you have already heard, but I needed to make a formal announcement. If you haven’t heard, please be prepared for some truly awful… news. Last—” He falters and then restarts. “Last night at some point after everyone left for the day, Ron Tipken…decided to take his own life downstairs in our parking lot.”

I’ve been kicked in the balls before, and it’s so painful that at first you feel nothing. You double over and grab your crotch because you know the pain is coming, but for five or six seconds you’re basically trapped in your brain, where facts are processed but no pain exists.

My mouth goes numb when Keith finishes his announcement. The fluorescent lights above my head flare in my clouding vision. I drift above my chair like I’m at the dentist inhaling nitrous oxide.

Keith says a series of stock grief phrases: “…our hearts go out to his… his hard work and his natural…his smile and his fun personality…” I would usually be angered by this corporate platitude bullshit, but it seems heartfelt this time. Before he finishes, Keith breaks down in tears and waves his hand to show that he can’t talk anymore.

This is the first time I glimpse the humanity in my boss, and it makes me question all my assumptions about him.

In the comic book sense, Keith is the natural villain to my superhero. He’s my polar opposite. He loves Paine-Skidder; is proud to tell people where he works and what he does. For me, describing my job is like describing a rash. He arrives at work at seven a.m. every morning and reads a newspaper in his car until the building supervisor shows up to unlock the doors. He stays later than anyone else. His life oozes punctuality, propriety, and enthusiasm. His suits are pressed perfectly. His bald head is freshly shaved each morning. His office is a cleaning lady’s wet dream.

But here he is, crying about one of his employees, a young man he’s known professionally for a little more than a year and has had no personal contact with beyond a few stilted conversations in passing. Maybe Keith’s not such a bad guy after all.

Everyone in the meeting room stares at me. I feel their eyes on me like warm breath on my neck. Ron was my good friend. Everyone knows we were planning a show together. I’m sure in a morbid way that they’re anxiously awaiting my snot-filled breakdown so they can put their hands on my shoulder and comfort me. But I can hardly breathe, let alone cry.

I ask “how did he do it?” Already, my suspicions are aroused. Something is amiss. I feel angry. Someone took my friend away and is going to pay.

Keith seems caught off-guard by my question and my skeptical tone. He looks at Suzanne, who shrugs helplessly, then folds his hands. “With a gun, it seems.”

“What gun? He didn’t own a gun.” I sound angrier than I intend.

Keith shifts from foot to foot. He doesn’t speak.

Suzanne steps behind me and crouches to talk in my ear. “If you need to go home for the day, that’s OK, Bobby. This is a lot to…process.” My apartment is a black hole since I got rid of my mementos of Nancy (her hobby was beading necklaces, and vacuuming up her beads made my vacuum cleaner sound like one of those toy versions that pop little balls around inside when you roll them). That’s the last place I want to be right now.

Trying to digest the idea that Ron is dead, I don’t have room for any other thoughts. If I were thinking about the people around me, I would think how nice it is that they all care about Ron. Everyone is crying, except Harry, who is too fucking dumb to cry. He still looks confused, and I bet he’s trying to remember who Ron is.

A few weeks later, I curse myself for not studying the faces and body language of everyone in that room. I should’ve been scrutinizing everyone, sizing them up for physical signs of duplicity, what poker players call
tells
.

The only person in the meeting room who seemed capable of murder was an editor named Cody Heet. Cody was a former Marine who liked to sneak up on me at least twice a week, grab my chin, and put a penknife to my throat. “You gotta be ready for anything all the time, son. I could’ve just sliced you ear to ear.” An obnoxious exercise, but one of the few exciting things that would happen during my workday, so I never discouraged it. It fueled my fantasy that one day Cody would come in with a machine gun and blow us all away. A terrible thought, but not as terrible as the thought of working at Paine-Skidder for the next forty years.

Cody once told me that part of Marine training involved killing a dummy hundreds of times, until the motions lost their meaning and became rote. He said this was how you were desensitized; that it was the only way an average guy could go through with ending another man’s life, especially in hand-to-hand combat.

Cody cries in a reserved, macho way with barely audible sobs. His head is bowed, a hand over his eyes. His chest rising and falling in rapid jerks.

He is the first white guy under forty with a cool non-ironic mustache since Tom Selleck was Magnum, P.I. Cody gets a lot of women. He is a sex addict who once showed me his comically extensive sexual to-do list, which included SEX WITH AN ASIAN WOMAN I MEET ON THE SUBWAY.

To my knowledge, Cody and Ron had gotten along well but didn’t interact much, so Cody had no motive that I was aware of. But when my suspicions turned to Paine-Skidder employees, he would be the first person I’d investigate. He was the only guy at work I knew who owned a gun. He owned several, actually.

The Paine-Skidder building is in West Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, a new hot spot for local businesses. The company is eighty percent female. Most employees are married with children. Four married couples work at Paine-Skidder; with a little over a hundred workers, that means almost eight percent of the company is married to itself.

The day after I got my service award was our company picnic. After three consecutive years of rain, we finally had a sunny day. But an eighteen-wheeler tipped over down the road from our building and leaked noxious fumes. We were sent home, and the barbecued ambrosia waiting for us outside had to be thrown out. To make matters worse, this early dismissal ruined one of the most delicate and precarious tasks of my investigation.

That disappointment sums up life at Paine-Skidder for me; the name itself starts with
pain
. If that’s not irony, it’s at least cruelty.

* * *

After Keith tells us about Ron’s “suicide,” I sit at my desk staring at my computer screen. I stare at my computer instead of doing something productive all the time, but this time I don’t bother to fool people into thinking I’m working.

A loud, humming gush of air whirs in my ears. My pulse throbs. My tongue feels like fiberglass insulation. I taste stomach acid, phlegm, and a drop of blood deep in my throat. My cube shrinks until it hovers an inch above my skin like those old diver suits you see in the bottom of fish tanks. I can’t breathe.

I hear myself sigh, but the sound seems to come from someone else. And then I’m moving, walking, sprinting down stairways, bursting through doors. I stop, breathing hard, when I get to P3.

I need to see his body. That’s the only way to get the idea that’s stuck in my throat through my thick skull. I can see his hunter green Jeep Cherokee sitting in the center of a wrestling ring of yellow POLICE LIMIT tape.

A half-dozen cops lean, crouch, and squat around the Jeep. I don’t pay attention to what they’re doing, but I assume they’re dusting for fingerprints, labeling evidence, snapping pictures.

I bend down and lift the yellow tape to step under it when a hand presses on my shoulder.

“You can’t come in here.”

I stand, coming face-to-face with a plainclothes detective. He’s a few inches shorter than me and has a wispy pompadour. I must look distraught because the detective seems more sympathetic than annoyed. He introduces himself, but I don’t hear him. I can’t feel the cold air, but I see the detective’s breath when he speaks.

Ron’s body isn’t in the Jeep. What I see instead is his brain vomited across the passenger window. From where I stand I can make out little isosceles triangles of bone in the blood and brain matter. The images sear into my memory in the brief moments before the plainclothes detective steps in front of me to block my view.

Talking in a soft tone, the detective guides me to the elevator. I don’t hear anything he says. He tucks his business card into my palm. I nod at nothing in particular and step into the elevator.

From those moments before I was ushered to the elevator, what I read in the newspaper the next day, and what the woman who found Ron’s body that morning told me, these are the details I have gathered:

The Jeep was still in its parking spot. The engine was running and the car was in drive. Music was playing either from a CD or the radio. Only the driver’s window was rolled down. Ron was not wearing his seat belt. The bullet went through Ron’s left temple. The gun was found on the floor between his legs.

The last person who saw Ron alive was the security guard at the front desk. Ron had been working late on a project with our boss, Keith. Other than a goodnight from the security guard, Keith was probably the last person to talk to Ron.

Ron signed out at the front desk at six o’clock, at least a half-hour after everyone else in the building—not including the cleaning crew—had gone home. No one knows what happened after he got into his car. He may have died two minutes later, or an hour.

No one else entered that level of the parking garage until just before seven-thirty the next morning. Beatrice Jenkins, a sweet woman in her sixties from Account Services, parked a few spots away from Ron’s Jeep. She saw the blood on the passenger window and walked around the car and saw Ron’s body slumped in the driver’s seat.

The police found a sealed, unaddressed Paine-Skidder envelope behind the driver’s visor. Ron’s suicide note was inside. It was typed, but signed by Ron.

There were no signs of anyone besides Ron having been there when he died. No fingerprints that didn’t belong to someone the police expected to be in or around the car.

The police had no reason to suspect murder.

But I wanted to know why the car was in drive. Why Ron decided to kill himself at work. And why anyone would
type
a suicide note.

After going down to the parking garage to see Ron’s body and meeting the detective, I go right to Eve. Her eyes are red, which seems odd since she didn’t know Ron at all, but then again it seems like every woman in the building is crying. Ron was younger than a lot of the sons of women at Paine-Skidder.

I come in without knocking and sit in Eve’s visitor chair. “Can we get outta here? Not to… you know. I just—I need to get out of this place.”

“We can’t. I’m sorry. I can’t talk now. You have to go. I’ll call you tonight.”

“What are you talking about? I need you.”

Her eyes dart around, looking behind me. “Bobby, I mean it. Go. Please.”