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  “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.

  Chapter 11

  Intro to Investigation

  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

  I expect Helen to show up with a box of Ron’s belongings, expect us to sit down, roll up our sleeves, and start to piece this puzzle together. Instead, I open the door and see her empty-handed with bloodshot eyes.

  Deciding not to question what Helen has been crying about until I find out what she learned in Ron’s bedroom, I tell her to come inside and I lock the door behind us. Over my shoulder, I ask, “What do you have for me?”

  She answers by sliding her hands around my waist from behind, stopping at the muscles that lead to my love zone. “Whatever you need.” She presses her forehead to the back of my neck.

  “You know what I mean.” My love zone expands slightly.

  “Look at me.” She raises her hands above my waist to turn me around.

  Her eyes are moist; her sad pout looks vulnerably sexy. She gets so close to me you wouldn’t be able to slide an envelope between our bodies. Her hands squeeze my butt like she’s comparing the ripeness of two honeydews.

  Not to brag, but my ass is composed of two extremely ripe honeydews.

  With her eyes and hands, Helen starts pulling me the ten feet
between the front door and the foot of my bed. Despite my now fully-enlarged zone, I want to tell her to stop.

  My reason for wanting her to stop should be because she must’ve been crying about something she found in Ron’s bedroom, and it would be wrong of me to take advantage of her. But her sadness only makes me want her more: I need to wrap myself around her and take her pain away. The real reason I want her to stop is because it’s too soon. Helen is all I want, and getting her now means losing out on weeks or months of hoping, pining, planning, fantasizing, missed opportunities, mixed signals, regrets, frustrated obsession, and the thrill of eminent failure.

  Even with the taboo of her being the emotional widow of my murdered best friend, I mostly just don’t want to lose the hunt.

  “We should wait.” I can’t bring myself to actually say “no.”

  “I don’t wait anymore. There’s no guarantee that we’ll both see tomorrow.”

  Logic I can’t deny, and with meaningful experience to back it up. Plus, I’m dying to know what’s going on behind those cute beaver panties. Is she bushy, trimmed, or shaved clean? I bet she’s trimmed to just a silver-dollar patch. I already know the basic nipple situation thanks to the beater she wore the other night.

  She kisses me, her sweet clove breath filling my mind with thoughts of sex and ham. I smell her strawberry hair.

  As soon as we hit the bed, I take over. Because I’m funny, most girls expect me to be soft and sensitive in the sack, maybe even a little shy. But sex is one of the only things I do like a man. The other manly things I do include hating clothes shopping and bottling up my emotions for extended periods before letting them explode.

  From the look on Helen’s face, she’s pleasantly surprised. For a guy my age, seeing all the tricks I have up my sleeve surprises her more. Now I’m the magician, pulling an endless string of multicolored knotted handkerchiefs out of her vagina like love beads. And just when she thinks I’ve finished my act, a tiny dove flies out of her ass.

  The contrast between Eve and Helen floods my senses. Different perfumes, lotions, hairstyles, clothing. And the skin. Eve had soft and slightly wrinkled skin, almost loose from the muscle; it moved in my fingers like satin sheets. Eve’s skin comforted me. Helen’s skin is fresh and taut. Not soft, but infinitely smooth. When I touch it, I feel energy.

  In the middle of our coitship, Helen says, “Tell me you love me.” And I do. Do tell her and do love her. She is my world right now, my only friend and the only person who believes me. I say it again and again. So does she. The feeling is incredible, intense, and then I can’t stop thinking about Nancy. The irony of this isn’t lost on me: I sometimes had trouble thinking about Nancy when she was the one beneath me.

  When I’m not picturing Nancy, I wonder what Helen found in Ron’s bedroom. If I weren’t sure it would kill the mood, I might try and slip the topic into dirty talk.

  When we’re done, I ask Helen if she wouldn’t mind smoking a cigarette and looking like I just rocked her world, and she obliges me with a giggle. She really nails the you-just-rocked-my-world look with a mix of elation, wonderment, and fear.

  As if reading my mind, Helen tells me what I need to know moments after putting her panties back on (panties that cover a beautifully bare yum-yum, so I was wrong). “Sorry, Bobby, I looked through every single thing in that room and didn’t find one thing that could help us.”

  “Not one thing?”

  “Nothing weird. Nothing suspicious.”

  “Something that made you cry?”

  “Huh?”

  “Your eyes when you got here.”

  “Yeah. It was nothing related to what we need.”

  “What was it?”

  “It’s personal.” Her tone ends the exchange. She puts on the shirt I’d been wearing before we schtupped and walks out of my tiny bedroom. “Whattya’ got good to eat in this joint?”

  I tell her to help herself to whatever I have.

  She coos, her head in my fridge. “Aw, you sweetheart.”

  “What?”

  “You bought beer for me.”

  Chapter 12

  Ms. Jenkins

  For an investigative sidekick, Helen proved to be an incredible piece of ass. She really hadn’t found anything in Ron’s bedroom that would help me. Ron put the same goofy motivational notes to himself in his dresser drawers that I found in his cube. He had five rubber chickens in his room, each with its own name written in red marker across its chest: Bill Bixby, Bill Cosby, Billy Ray Cyrus, Bilbo Baggins, and Bill of Rights. He had a xylophone and a book on how to play it, something Helen and I hadn’t known. He owned two tuxedos, one powder blue, the other tangerine. In his closet, he’d kept every yearbook from kindergarten to college, stacked in chronological order, all in pristine condition.

  What Ron didn’t have in his closet was skeletons.

  Sitting in my cube, rotting, staring at an entire article devoted to the OTHER category for race on health care forms, I mull over the fact that Ron seemed to have no enemies.

  Then my thoughts drift to the guilt filling the void that had been left when I conquered the all-too-willingly-conquered Helen and lost the thrill of the chase. My body drained of its sexual energy from the night before, I feel the way a teenage boy might feel after masturbating to thoughts of his sister. (Since I don’t have a sister, this feels like a safe analogy.)

  Then I wonder again what Helen found in Ron’s room that made her cry. The only interesting thing in her scavenger hunt, and she won’t tell me what it is.

  Then I spend ten minutes trying to remember the name of the killer in the movie The Fugitive. Not the one-armed man; he was just the hit man. The killer was Dr. Richard Kimball’s good friend, another doctor. I can’t remember the character’s name or the actor who plays him. I go through the alphabet in my head, making the sound of each letter to see if that brings his name to the tip of my mental tongue. No luck.

  The sad thing about that movie, the tragic part that I don’t think the movie adequately addresses, is that Kimball is, in a roundabout way, the cause of his wife’s death. The hit man comes to kill Kimball, but kills his wife because she’s home instead of him. That must’ve torn him apart with guilt. What was that killer’s name?

  I eventually give up and check the Internet. His name is Dr. Charles Nichols, played by Jeroen Krabbé. No wonder I couldn’t think of the actor’s name.

  Thankfully, my short-attention-span mind finds its way back to Ron. He had no personal enemies that I know of, and it was unlikely that he had any enemies at work. Suddenly, one simple fact slaps me across the face and it’s the most glaring clue I have: Ron died at Paine-Skidder. Why here? If the killer wanted to make it look like a suicide, he should’ve gone to Ron’s house and killed him at night. I bet most suicides take place at home, and since Ms. Tipken worked nights, Ron was almost always home alone. The killer shot Ron at work because that was the most convenient place for him to set it up. He could plan his act there; control certain things.

  The killer works at Paine-Skidder.

  The killer must’ve considered shooting Ron at home and decided work was easier. A big risk, but the killer probably thought it would be worth it because he found some trick to make it look like suicide, something he could pull off on P3 but not at Ron’s house. But what was this trick?

  Good. I’m starting to get into the killer’s head. That head is somewhere in this building, thinking it got away with murder. That head has no idea that I will retrace its steps and find the body it’s attached to, and then send the body and its head to life in prison or death by lethal injection.

  The first person I need to talk to at work is Beatrice Jenkins, the poor old lady who found Ron’s body. I’ve never spoken to her before, as far as I know. My portrait parle for her at the moment is “old black lady.” I don’t know which department she works in or on what floor. Even when I find out her department, I’ll have to navigate the labyrinth of identical cubes to find her. Ah, the challenges that a
detective faces.

  * * *

  My supervisor Suzanne knows where everyone sits. I think that’s how people become supervisors: they take a test on where everyone sits and what everyone’s jobs are.

  I grab an empty interoffice memo folder and knock on Suzanne’s door. “Do you know where Beatrice Jenkins sits? This came to me by mistake.” A clever—if unnecessary—ruse.

  “She sits twenty feet from where you sit. Just go around the corner there, she’s on the right side near Fred Syke’s office.”

  Man, I need to walk around the office more.

  * * *

  “Hi, I’m Bobby.” I stand outside Beatrice’s cube, a small yellow tablet and blue pen in my hands, smiling the way you smile when you see an acquaintance at a funeral. “I was… Ron was my best friend here.”

  Beatrice nods slightly and sucks in air like she’s preparing for a punch in the gut.

  “I’m writing a story about what happened to him. Kind of my way of grieving.” I am a ruse machine today.

  “A book?”

  “More of a short story. But not that short. Detailed. Like a novella. But non-fiction.”

  Beatrice nods again. She wears a bright blue floral pantsuit. Her hair is dyed an unnatural gold color and pulled into a tiny ball in the back of her head. She doesn’t invite me to sit, doesn’t ask me what I want from her. She waits for me to speak again. Her body looks rigid.

  I tap my pen on my tablet. “Would it be OK if I asked you a few questions about that morning? I want to get the details right and the cops—I asked them for details and they said it was… private. Sealed information or confidential. Off-limits.” Will you shut up! She won’t be suspicious if you can just stop rambling. “So, can I ask you a few things?”

  Her eyes widen slightly. “Now?”

  “Are you busy?”

  “I… not really. But…” She doesn’t want to relive that morning.

  “It won’t take long.”

  She stares at me for a few moments, probably hoping I’ll offer to come back later if that’s better for her. Instead, I point to her desk chair and ask if I can sit. She nods again. As I sit, she starts pinching the fabric on one leg of her pants with both hands.