Free Cube Sleuth by David Terruso

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