Cube Sleuth (4 page)

I curl my lip angrily and punch the side of her cube before stomping out and pouting my way back to my own.

Eve has been a hit-or-mistress of late (she no longer met the technical requirements for a mistress once Nancy dumped me, but I was fond of the term). One day, she would be all over me and the next day, I couldn’t get so much as a high-five from her. Some nights she couldn’t wait to see me, some nights we’d make plans and she wouldn’t show up or answer her phone. Buy me a nice lunch one day, nod to me in the hall like an acquaintance the next. Either she was two different people, or I was.

I knew nothing about Eve’s family life; her background, her secrets. I tried to find out, but she wouldn’t yield an inch. Handling the two faces of Eve didn’t upset me much because I honestly didn’t know what I wanted from her. I doubted that bringing her home to meet my parents would go over well. My mom wasn’t fond of tattoos and weird piercings, and I figured that Eve being in her forties was the age-equivalent of bringin’ someone with a green Mohawk home.

But as pathetic as it sounds, with Nancy gone and Ron in a body bag, Eve was the only friend I had.

* * *

Sitting in church with my boss Keith, my supervisor Suzanne, and dozens of other employees, I try not to think about what the inside of Ron’s head looked liked sprayed across his car’s interior. I’m glad it has to be a closed casket. I want to remember Ron smiling, laughing, being ridiculous.

I somehow lost the wallet-sized picture of Ron in the white dress shirt. I spent an hour last night trying to find it. I know I haven’t taken it out of my wallet since he gave it to me, but I have no idea when I saw it last. That picture is really how I want to remember him.

Ron’s mother doesn’t look like she’s been crying. She looks exhausted. She has a stern face, like the kind of woman who would yell at her child in a mall and who would make grown men would snap to attention in case she were addressing them. She works nights, so I haven’t met her before.

The girl standing beside Ron’s mother has to be Helen. She looks like she’s been crying a lot, maybe even throwing up. I doubt I’ll catch a glimpse of the smile that Ron claimed transformed her normal face into a beautiful one.

Instead of saying a prayer while kneeling in front of Ron’s coffin, I recite lines from
Ghostbusters II
in my head. That’s what Ron would want. I choose a beautiful Bill Murray monologue that I know Ron loved.

“I’m Bobby. I was doing a sketch show with Ron. I’m sorry for your loss,” I say when I reach Ron’s mother. I try to hug her, but she opts for a rather firm handshake.

As I step over to Helen, she grabs me and kisses my cheek twice. “I wish we’d met in a less shitty way. Ron talked about you a lot. We should hang out sometime.” Her voice is strained, her makeup smeared, but I feel a welcoming warmth in her fingers. She won’t let go of my shoulders. I immediately see what Ron saw. It probably would have been love at first sight with Helen if my first time meeting her hadn’t been a few feet from my best friend’s remains.

Walking back to my pew, I think about Helen’s ex, Theo. Ron despised him, and I’m sure Theo resented Ron. As I return to my seat and sit down next to my boss, I stop grieving. Theo had a motive. Ron took away Theo’s love, the girl he was planning to marry. Maybe Theo got his revenge by taking Ron’s life.

No more tears. I know now I have work to do. Ron’s killer is out there living his life, and no one is looking for him. It’s up to me to find him. I have one suspect and one motive. That’s all I need.

After driving by Theo’s place in Telford to make sure his car is in the driveway, I park a quarter-mile down the road and walk back to his house. I don’t want anyone who sees what I’m about to do to give my license plate number to the police.

My heart thumps against my ribs as I get close; I feel like I’m about to step onstage and deliver my first line. This will be a quite a performance, pretending I’m a tough guy with fighting experience and not just a nerd who was spared from repeated beatings in grade school because my best friend’s family was in the mob.

Before a show, my old sketch partner Owen and I used to say a bastardized version of the announcer’s test from Radio Central New York from the forties. Jerry Lewis made it famous as a tongue twister. I taught it to Ron the last time I was with him. It helps me focus and relax.

I whisper the announcer test to myself to calm my nerves as I walk. It goes from one to ten; you say one, then one and two, then one, two, and three, etc.:

I see two possible outcomes: One, Theo shoots me in the chest. I die and get to ask Ron whether or not he killed himself. Two, Theo punches me, takes my bat, and breaks various bones with it. As usual, I’m a knight-errant. At least this time I have a woman’s honor to defend, and a sword of sorts.

What is probably the evening news flickers in the half-dozen houses I pass on my walk to Theo’s. The houses are spread out enough that if I’m quiet, Theo’s neighbors may not know anything is happening to him at all. My South Philly eyes never seem able to adjust to this rural brand of darkness. As a child, I learned to sleep with street lamps streaming in through the windows. Now, I can barely make out the shape of the bat I’m holding in front of my face.

The cool spring air tingles the back of my neck and my scalp under my hair. Even though this is a residential area, I have a small but growing fear that a wild cougar will leap out from behind a shed and maul me to death. A monkey could drop from a tree to eviscerate me while masturbating with his feet. An emu might bob up and poke my eyes out with two squishy
pops
.

Avoiding the jungle predators of Telford, I approach Theo’s Mustang. In the dark, I can’t see the shine from the wax job I noticed the first time I had visited him. His ‘stang is what guys like him call “cherry.”

Tapping my bat against the driver’s side window, I practice the angle of my swing like I’m in the on-deck circle. I glance up at Theo’s house and see the glow from what is probably a
Girls Gone Wild
DVD.

Taking a deep breath, I swivel my hips and bring the bat across my body and into the window. The crunching squeal of glass shattering into thousands of tiny cubes replaces the serene symphony of crickets. I feel a near-sexual release of tension throughout my body.

Still no movement from inside Theo’s house. I line up my second shot, the rear driver’s side window, and let ’er rip. The window doesn’t completely shatter this time, so I have to scrape the bat around the border of the window to knock the stray chips into the car. I’m a little OCD in my destruction.

A shadow streaks across Theo’s living room window. I stand behind the Mustang, bringing my Louisville sword down on the rear windshield. The glass buckles, cracks spidering across it in asymmetrical snowflakes. The defroster wires keep the structure of the windshield together. I bludgeon the beveled rectangle again and again until the whole plate falls into the backseat.

Theo storms onto the porch. He hefts a large shotgun to shoulder level, aims at me, and cocks the hammer.

“Hey, Theo.” I wink at him, strolling around the car to smash the rear passenger window. “Nice car.”

“Don’t move.”

“Why? Is there a spider on me?” I lift the bat.

Theo takes a step toward me. “You break that window, I pull—”

I break that window. Adrenaline chugs inside me. The defiance intoxicates me. This is how I wish I could be with Keith.

Theo advances, his eyes locked on my chest. He stomps down the steps and stops a few feet from the front bumper of his now un-cherry Mustang. “You’re on my property. Trespassing. By law, I can shoot you in self-defense.”

“I’m well aware of that. But thanks for the warning.” I whack the front passenger window so hard that bits of glass fly through the hole that used to be the driver’s side window.

Theo inches forward and I see that his finger rests on the trigger guard, but not the actual trigger. “You think I’m kidding?”

I don’t. I can barely hear him over the percussion of my own heartbeat in my ears. He seems like he’s gathering the nerve to shoot me. My life could end in moments. What scares me is that most of me hopes he can muster the courage to do the deed. I thought I had come to avenge Helen, but maybe I came for the same reason she had: to be punished. “Do what you gotta do.”

Theo looks squeezed by fear. He didn’t expect me to call his bluff.

I start chopping at the front windshield like it’s a redwood. Theo slides toward me until the barrel of his shotgun is pressed against my chest. “If I pull this trigger, it’ll blow your spine into the trees. She really worth it?”

I lower the bat and look into Theo’s eyes. My chest rattles against the shotgun like teeth chattering in the cold. “Look, we both know you’re not gonna kill me.” He’s on the fence, and I hope the power of suggestion will keep my “spine out of the trees.” I wonder if he detects the faint quiver in my voice. “If you
were
, you’d have done it already. You’re afraid you don’t know the law as well as you think, that you might end up in prison for life for killing me. You’re probably right. This car really worth it?”

Theo keeps the shotgun pressed to my chest and takes a deep breath, letting it out slowly through pursed lips. I think this is how they teach you to breathe before you squeeze the trigger at a shooting range. “You
know
you’re gonna pay for what you just did.”

“How about this: throw the gun in the house, I’ll lose the bat, and we can have the fight you wanted to have last time I was here?”

Theo stares at me for a long time. He blinks hard, then lowers the shotgun.

I breathe for what seems like the first time in over a minute.

Without breaking eye contact, Theo rips the bat from my hands and tosses it on his porch. He lays the shotgun in his doorway, then runs at me like a pro wrestler bouncing off the ropes.

When he’s a foot from my face, his arm swings around and his fist bashes into the side of my cheek with a force that knocks me to my knees.

I don’t remember his fist making contact. I remember him rushing toward me and then being on my knees. So I might have blacked out for an instant. I touch the source of the stinging in my cheek just as Theo kicks me in the gut. I roll onto my side in the fetal position, drooling in the dirt.

“Get up so I can put you down again.” Theo’s spit hits the collar of my shirt.

I take my time rocking myself onto my knees. The pain has made me temporarily lose my bearings, and I nearly forget to fight back.

“Come on, pussy. Faster.”

I push off and get to my feet, but fall to one knee before Theo can throw another punch.

“Get the fuck up! Now!” He grabs my hair and pulls me to my feet, uprooting a dozen precious strands in the process.

Time slows. I see Theo bring his arm up to clobber me. I have a window of maybe a second to make a decision before I’m back on the ground. As Theo’s arm reaches back for a full swing, I see a cloudy blue oval in the corner of my vision. It’s Cody, or a memory of him, saying “The windpipe. You chop right there, cut off his air supply, and he’s helpless.” I feel like I’m in
Return of the Jedi
.

My hand soars across the space between Theo and me and lands in the center of his Adam’s apple. His punch hits my left Tricep at the same time.

Theo’s hands cover his throat. He gags and doubles over. I punch him in the top of the head, which really hurts my knuckles. He collapses forward like a drunk, head on the ground and ass in the air. I take a step back and kick him in the ribs where Helen’s bruises were. He tries to scream but hasn’t yet regained his wind. I crouch and punch him in the jaw with all my might. I don’t know if I have the correct punching form, but these blows really hurt my hand.

Theo lies on his side, eyes closed. I taunt him but he doesn’t respond.

I grab my bat from the porch. Kicking Theo onto his back, I step on his right forearm to keep it still. He whimpers, looking up at me in a daze. I spit in his face, which seems to instantly sober him.

“You don’t hit women. Ever.” I slam the bat down on his hand, expecting to hear the crunch of splintering bone. Instead I hear a soggy thud, as if I’d just hit the dirt. Theo springs up like a plastic skeleton in a haunted-house coffin. His garbled scream scares me so much I drop the bat.

He grabs at his broken hand. I kick his hand away and step on his forearm again, picking up the bat. I clobber his broken hand twice more. It already looks swollen and purple. When I step away, I regard him with pity. He lies on his back, rocking in pain, cradling his demolished hand, crying like a child.

I massage my hand, which aches where I broke it from punching the wall a couple years ago. Maybe
that’s
why it hurts when I punch.

I have the urge to blurt out,
I’m sorry!
What I actually say is, “If you ever touch her again, I’ll cut your hand off.” Resting the bat on my shoulder like a homerun hitter, I turn and walk toward my car.

* * *

This encounter with Theo happened two months after Ron’s funeral and two months before I get my Five Years of Service award.

But several important things happened between the day of Ron’s funeral and the day I took a bat to Theo’s car and hand.

Let me get you up to speed.