A Farewell to Legs
An Aaron Tucker Mystery
Jeffrey Cohen
Copyright 2003 by Jeffrey Cohen
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by electronic means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote passages in a review.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Published by Bancroft Press (“Books that enlighten”)
P.O. Box 65360, Baltimore, MD 21209
800-637-7377
410-764-1967 (fax)
www.bancroftpress.com
Cover and interior design: Tammy Sneath Grimes, Crescent Communications
www.tsgcrescent.com • 814.941.7447
Author photo: Frank Dougherty
ISBN 1-890862-29-0 (cloth)
ISBN 1-890862-34-7 (paper)
LCCN 2003108324
Smashwords Edition
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
To
The Brotherhood of the Tray
Contents
Prologue
Part 1. The Lizard
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Part 2. The Dog
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Praise for Jeffrey Cohen and A Farewell to Legs
About the Author
Prologue
Cheri (pronounced “She-REE”) Braxton got out of bed and walked to the bathroom door, not bothering to cover her naked body with a sheet, the way they do in the movies. She’d never understood that: two people have just spent the night going at it like sex has just been invented, and the next morning, they’re always covering up, as if they hadn’t just spent ten hours looking at each other’s good parts.
The guy in her bed, Louis (pronounced “Louis”) Gibson, pushed back the few strands of hair left on his head and admired the view as Cheri walked to the bathroom. He smiled as he always did, and it was convincing, ingratiating, and emotionless.
“Baby,” he said, “I like nothing better than watching you walk away.”
She stopped, turned, and modeled her form, giving him a good long look. “What’s the matter, Louie?” she asked, her voice a disgusting drawl she thought sounded cute. “You don’t like seeing me walk toward you?”
“Of course I do,” he said flatly, dismissing her. “I was trying to be romantic, and you spoiled it.”
She harrumphed, and walked into the bathroom. Cheri had intended to splash some cold water on her face and pee, but if that was the kind of attitude he was going to have, Louie could just lie there and wait while she took a long hot shower. She turned on the water in the tub and opened the medicine cabinet. Might as well brush her teeth, too.
Louis put his hands behind his head and lay back on the pillow. This thing with Cheri was already starting to get old, he thought. Six weeks, and she was pissing him off as often as his wife. At least his wife had waited until they were married a couple of years before she started complaining that he wasn’t romantic enough. So he’d gotten her pregnant again, and then she had so much to do watching the boys that she didn’t have time to nag about his ignoring goddamn Valentine’s Day.
Cheri, though, was another story. She’d broken the land speed record for annoying Louis. A nice ass—he’d certainly admit she had that—but she had a mouth on her, too, and who needed that in a mistress? Mistresses were for sex, for chrissakes. If he wanted backtalk, he could stay home. It was a good thing this relationship would be over soon.
Louis smiled as he lay there. If he wanted, he could find six or seven other girls within a week—exotic ones, too. Not white bread bores like Cheri Braxton. Life was good these days. The right people were getting elected, and that meant contributions were pouring in. He had his pick of the women he knew, and he had plenty of money. More than anyone knew. What else did a man need?
Louis closed his eyes and smiled contentedly.
Cheri stayed in the shower as long as she could, until she couldn’t think of any other body parts that needed cleaning. And the longer she stayed under the hot water, the more steamed she got.
Who the hell did this joker think she was? A $40 whore he could call whenever he felt like it, screw however many times he could that night (which was usually once), then turn and leave and not call until he got horny again? Why not leave money on the dresser when he left? She had a college degree, after all! She worked for a government agency, and had the potential to move up into a managerial position. She didn’t have to put up with this from a guy 15 years older than she was!
She got out of the shower and put on a terrycloth robe hanging from a hook on the back of the bathroom door. Screw him! It wasn’t like she loved the little jerk. She didn’t even like him. But he had powerful friends, and she had ambition. Still, no job she could get in this government was worth having to put up with him. She could find somebody else to screw, and maybe even enjoy it.
Cheri opened the robe and looked at herself in the full-length mirror on the back of the door. Not bad at all for 27. Everything was still where Nature had put it. Gravity hadn’t started its inevitable pull to the ground. She looked damn good, if she did say so herself. Better than she’d been giving herself credit for. Better than anybody old Louie out there would see again, for a long, long time.
That was that, then. It didn’t even take much courage to decide. She’d just go out there right now and tell Louis this was the last time they’d see each other. Let him find somebody else to watch walking away from the bed.
She tossed back her damp hair in a defiant gesture, left the robe open (so he could see what he’d be missing), and marched out to give Louis his marching orders.
The only thing that stopped her was the stunned, amazed expression on his face. That, and the kitchen knife sticking out of his chest.
Part 1: The Lizard
Chapter
One
In retrospect, it all started with the lizard.
“A gecko?” I said. “You want to give an eight-year-old girl a gecko?”
I stared into my bedroom closet with what I’m sure was the same expression Dr. Livingstone had assessing the Nile for the first time, a combination of absolute wonderment and complete confusion. My wife Abby stood behind me, doing her very best not to snicker.
“They make very low-maintenance pets,” she said in a soothing tone, as if she were addressing a potentially dangerous mental patient. “You don’t have to walk them, you very rarely have to clean the aquarium and they never make any noise. Try the blue one.”
She indicated a royal blue Gap t-shirt I’d been avoiding. I turned to her, surprised, and pointed at it. Yes, Abby nodded, that one.
“I can wear a t-shirt to a high school reunion? And why, exactly, does our daughter even need a pet that looks like it escaped from The Land That Time Forgot?”
Abby smiled tolerantly, once again secure in the knowledge that I would, indeed, collapse into a heap of quivering jelly without her. On her way to the bedroom closet door, she pressed by me (and I did very little to get out of her way, thus necessitating as much pressing as possible).
“Leah loves animals. I want to encourage her to develop that interest, and this is the easiest way to start her on her way. Don’t worry—you won’t have to do anything.”
“Famous last words.”
My wife, befitting a woman of her dignity and accomplishment, stuck her tongue out at me. She leaned into the closet (we have a lean-in closet in our bedroom, meaning that it’s roughly the size of a small refrigerator, so all you can do is lean in) and came out with the blue T-shirt, a pair of black jeans I actually fit into, and my black sport jacket, which is made of something that approximates suede without actually harming any animals to produce it. Abby laid the clothes out on the bed. “There,” she said.
“My Hollywood scriptwriter disguise,” I said, nodding. On the rare occasions that one of my screenplays has generated enough interest for me to actually meet with a producer (and that is upwards of once), I have worn this exact ensemble. I began to take off my hideous flannel shirt (with only two holes in it) and my worn-to-the-white jeans (three holes, but two are in the knees).
“Certainly,” Abby said. “Show your old classmates how cool you are.”
“Cool, my love, is something I’ve never been able to pull off successfully.”
“Fake it,” she said. I grunted at that, and considered the question of the lizard again.
“So let’s suppose—and I want to stress that suppose—that I agree to this lizard thing. What does Jurassic Junior eat?”
It’s so rare I get to see my wife blush. As with everything else, it becomes her, but it’s unusual that she’d be flustered enough to let it show. I braced myself. She mumbled something.
“What?”
“WORMS!” she shouted, unintentionally, I presume. “It eats. . . worms. And they have to be. . . live.”
“Live? As in alive? We’re asking our eight-year-old to feed one living thing to another living thing as a character-building experience?” During this exchange, I had managed to don my entire screenwriter disguise, minus the jacket (which would make me sweat no matter what the weather, and so was best left for later).
“Well, she’s perfectly okay with it,” Abby said as I sat down again to put on my classy sneakers. “Melissa has one. . .”
That’s all I needed to know—the discussion was over. Leah and her friend Melissa are actually the same person, but you need two bodies to harness all their combined energy. They’re constantly in motion, constantly talking, and constantly together, so whatever one does, the other must certainly do. There’s no arguing with Melissa. Ever.
“Where do we get these worms?” I sighed. “Do we have to dig in the back yard? Remember, we have no, um, soil in the back yard.”
“The pet store. Then we keep them in the refrigerator.”
“The same refrigerator where we keep our food?” She nodded, and I think actually looked a little nauseated.
I stood up and put an arm over my wife’s shoulder. “Is there any power on heaven or earth that can stop this?”
“No.”
“Any chance I can get some sex out of saying yes?” I figured it was worth a shot.
“Not tonight. I’ll be asleep long before you get home.”
From downstairs, I could hear the doorbell ring, followed by Leah’s shrill shriek. “It’s Uncle Mahoney!” Abby and I started wearily toward the stairs.
“All in all,” I told her, “this night is not starting out terribly well.”
Chapter
Two
“Remind me why we’re going to this thing.”
Jeff Mahoney, all six-foot-whatever of him, was scrunched into the passenger seat of my 1997 Saturn four-door. He had pushed the seat back as far as it went, and still his knees were threatening to hit his chin.
“It’ll be fun,” I said unconvincingly. “We haven’t seen these people in twenty-five years.”
“And we didn’t like them then,” he reminded me.
“You’re not going in with a terrific attitude,” I pointed out.
“And you expected. . . what?”
I grumbled something under my breath and shoved a cassette into the car radio. John Mayer. Room for Squares. He grimaced, but didn’t say anything. To him, any music recorded after 1979 is suspect.
He was right, of course, although not about the music. There was no reason for me to have anticipated anything but a sour attitude from him, since it had been my idea for us to go to our 25th year high school reunion. Overcome by a sudden, inexplicable wave of nostalgia, I had responded to the invitation in my mail (along with the inevitable bills) by convincing him that we would spend the evening drinking and making fun of our former classmates. Well, he could drink, anyway. I’d appointed myself designated driver. The major effect of alcohol on my system is to make me sleepy.
I don’t know what it was that convinced me to go. At Bloomfield, NJ’s prime example of a high school in the mid-1970s, students divided themselves into the usual cliques: the jocks, the cheerleaders (who existed mostly to sleep with the jocks, thus serving to doubly tweak the rest of us), the brains (this was years before nerds were invented, and decades before computer geeks), and the remedial students.
And then there was Us. Myself, Mahoney, Friedman, Wharton, and McGregor. We were a group because we didn’t fit in with any of the other groups—we fell between the cracks. And we got along because we expected nothing of each other, and got exactly that. Besides Mahoney, who was still my closest friend, I had-n’t seen the others in at least 10 years.
So maybe it was that kind of reunion I had been trying to manufacture. I’d blackmailed Mahoney into going by telling him I wouldn’t go without him, and had emailed Bobby Fox, who was coordinating the reunion (and who was still, at 43, calling himself “Bobby”), to be sure Friedman, Wharton, and McGregor would be there. But I hadn’t told Mahoney, and I didn’t know why.
Now, he listened thoughtfully to the music, wrinkled his brow, and turned it down a notch. “This guy’s not bad,” he said. “But he’s never going to replace Jim Croce.”
“I’m sorry. I left my Bad Company tape back home in my white double-knit leisure suit.”
Mahoney grinned. “Somebody get up on the wrong side of the bed this morning?”
“I can’t remember why I wanted to go to this thing, either,” I admitted.
“It’s because Stephanie Jacobs is going to be there,” he said matter-of-factly. “You’ve had the hots for her since Gerald Ford was president.”
Stephanie Jacobs! I hadn’t even thought of her. Would she be at this miserable wing ding?
“Everybody had the hots for Stephanie Jacobs,” I reminded him. “And when I say ‘everybody. . .’”
When Mahoney and I were seventeen, all of us considered Stephanie Jacobs the ideal woman. Built so that she looked naked even in a down parka, Stephanie was rumored to have caused cardiac arrest in middle-aged men of, say, 30 or so.
“Not everybody,” said Mahoney.
“Your memory fails you,” I told him. “I remember a time you gave Stephanie Jacobs a ride home in the Mustang, and you talked about nothing else for six weeks.”
“Bullshit,” he said. “It was only four weeks.”
“Nonetheless. You had just as many hots for Stephanie Jacobs as everybody else.”
His eyes got a little dreamy. “That Mustang was a great car,” he said.
I decided to pretend he hadn’t spoken. “Anyway, she’s not the reason I wanted to go tonight,” I protested as I pulled into the parking lot of the luxurious Vacation Inn of Carteret, New Jersey. “I hadn’t thought once of her before you mentioned her name right now.”
“Sure,” said Mahoney. “You just knew she liked me better, anyway.”
“Uh-huh.”
We got out of the car after I parked, which made sense. If we’d gotten out before I’d parked, the car might very well have run over our feet and hurt us, and possibly destroyed property at the Inn. It’s important to follow certain procedures.
I led the way toward the door marked “Banquet Room,” which was sure to be an overstatement. And about 20 feet from the door, I stopped dead in my tracks.
Mahoney, who came close to barreling into me and causing permanent damage, slammed on his heels. “What the hell is wrong with you?” he yelped.
“I can’t go in. Let’s go to the movies or something. This was a bad idea.”
He laughed. “It’ll be fun! We haven’t seen these people in twenty-five years!” he said.
“Yeah, and we didn’t. . .”
“Why, Aaron Tucker,” purred a voice behind me that was laced with sex and nostalgia. “I hear you solve mysteries.”
Mahoney and I both spun around and muttered something in the tradition of Jackie Gleason’s classic “homina, homina, homina.”
Stephanie Jacobs, in a dress covering considerably less than a down parka would, stood maybe five feet away.
She smiled a satisfied smile that indicated she knew exactly what effect her voice would have on us. On me, really, since she wasn’t looking at Mahoney at all. Her deep blue eyes bored into me, and I’m pretty sure left a hole in the back of my head. Stephanie looked just as good as she had at 18, which was entirely unfair of her.
Maybe I hadn’t come just to see Friedman, Wharton and. . . what’s-their-names, after all.
Chapter
Three
It took me a few moments to regain the power of speech, and a few more to look Stephanie in the eye, something her plunging neckline wasn’t helping me achieve.
“I don’t solve mysteries,” I said when English once again became my primary language. “I’m a soldier on the bottom rung of the literary battleground.” It sounded good at the time. I have no idea what it meant, since battlegrounds don’t generally have rungs, but there was no time to think of that.
“That’s not what I heard,” she said, still not taking her eyes off me. I thought Mahoney might begin doing the tarantella behind my back just to get her attention. “I heard you found out who killed some woman in your town a while back.”
Well, therein lies a tale. And one I have told elsewhere, so I’ll spare you the details. I decided, in this case, to be modest.
“Oh, I was just working on a story and got lucky,” I said.
“You were lucky I was backing you up,” grumbled Mahoney, “or you might not be here today.”
His booming voice finally penetrated Stephanie’s radar screen, and she turned to him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You don’t have a name tag, and I’m embarrassed, but I can’t remember. . .”
“Come on inside,” I said, gesturing toward the door. “Let’s see who we can remember without name tags.”
I didn’t hold out my arm, but she took it anyway, and as we walked inside, Mahoney gave me the same look arsenic would give you if it had eyes.
Inside was a table with “Hello My Name Is” name tags, next to which was tastefully arranged an array of pictures from the football highlights of Bloomfield High School’s team for my graduation year (meaning three pictures, one for each of our victories against nine losses). Mahoney and I walked past the table, having decided ahead of time to forego the stupid tags and let people guess who we were. Stephanie stopped and carefully found hers, then tried to find an artful place to attach it to her dress. It took a while, but she managed.
I was across the room by the time she had assembled herself, but I did take some amusement in the looks our male classmates gave Stephanie as she made her way around the dining room. The nametag gave them a legitimate excuse to look where they wanted to look, which I believe was exactly the effect Stephanie had desired. But before I could make my way back to her, I felt a hand grab my upper arm, and turned.
Mark Friedman, looking every bit his age at 43, was smiling, tall, trim, and healthy-looking. I fought the urge the choke him.
“Hey, Tucker!” he yelled. “I saw you come in with the Goddess. How’d you manage that?”
“It’s nice to see you, too, Mark,” I attempted. “Are the other guys here?”
“I saw Wharton earlier,” he said. “He’s trying to get everybody to vote for him for something. But what about the Goddess? You banging her?”
“I’m married to a goddess,” I told him, “and it’s not Stephanie Jacobs. Before the parking lot five minutes ago, I hadn’t seen her in twenty years.”
“Could have fooled me, the way she was hanging onto your arm,” he said, doing his best to leer but coming up with a lopsided grin instead. Friedman could never really transcend his original image, that of a cute little boy. But he was constantly trying.
After showing off pictures of our respective children (they throw you out of the Father’s Union if you’re caught not carrying), Friedman and I caught up on professional accomplishments. His took longer than mine. He owned three carpet stores. I made a mental note to change professions.
We headed for the bar, where I got a Diet Coke (they never listen when you tell them to forget the lemon) and Friedman opted for a Chivas Regal with water on the side. I knew what I had paid for the Diet Coke, so, if Friedman could afford a Chivas at the cash bar, I figured there must be money in selling carpet in Central New Jersey.
The problem was, we weren’t making eye contact very much. And when we did, it was that kind of tentative, accidental eye contact that’s really just a way of finding out if the other guy is looking at you, or if he’s just checking out some woman he went on a date with 27 years ago.
“Where’d you say you saw Wharton?” I asked.
He looked relieved, pointed, and we walked across the room more or less together, waving at people we thought we recognized and avoiding the glances of people we were certain we recognized.
Halfway there, Stephanie grabbed my arm again. I thought Friedman was going to have a hemorrhage right then, and he found himself caught in one of those awkward situations where you don’t know if you should continue on the path you’ve begun or stop to ogle a woman’s cleavage. He was clearly leaning toward the latter, but I pushed him in Wharton’s direction and stayed to talk to Stephanie.
“You didn’t show me pictures of your children,” she said. “You have some, don’t you?”
“Two,” I admitted, reaching for the evidence. “Ethan is twelve, and Leah’s eight.”
She made the usual noises you make when you see someone else’s children. “So what do you do when you’re not solving murders?” she asked.
“I freelance.” Stephanie gave me the same confused look everybody gives me when I say that, and yet I persist. “Writing. Magazines and newspapers.” I actually pulled a business card out of my wallet and gave it to her.
“No kidding. My husband knows a lot of editors. Maybe he can help you get. . .”
Mahoney loomed up behind her. “Do you remember me yet?” he asked Stephanie. Clearly, the man was trying way too hard.
“I do. You drove me home once in the rain, didn’t you?” Damn, she was good. Mahoney’s grin got so wide I was afraid it would meet at the back of his head and his brain would fall out. While they were reliving this fascinating episode in their lives, I followed Friedman from the bar (where he’d replenished his Chivas) toward our resident politician.
Greg Wharton, New Jersey state assemblyman (and osteopath), brushed the forelock out of his eyes as we approached. Wharton was a little heavier than I remembered him, but then, I was a little heavier than I remembered me, too. His suit was nicely enough tailored that it was hard to tell exactly how much heavier he was than his early-30’s self, the last version of Wharton I had seen.
He smiled when he saw Friedman and me approaching, but as with all politicians or would-be politicians, it was hard to know if he meant it. I guess it doesn’t really matter. Wharton shook my hand heartily, as if he were campaigning outside a Stop & Shop and had just asked for my support.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Stephanie Jacobs talking to Mahoney, but she was looking past his left shoulder toward Michael Andersen, Bloomfield’s one-time quarterback, with whom she had performed all sorts of delectable acts in the back seat of a 1968 Ford Fairlane, at least according to rumor.
“So, what are you running for this time?” Friedman asked Wharton. “Board of Chosen Freeloaders?”
“That’s Freeholders,” said Wharton, his sense of humor sharp as ever. “And no, this time it’s State Senate. There are too many issues. . .”
“Spare me the campaign rhetoric,” I suggested. “I can always look it up on your web site, Whart. Besides, I don’t even live in your district.”
“You could move.”
Friedman rolled his eyes. “Nothing ever changes,” he said. “You still expect us to get you elected.” Wharton’s eyes narrowed. That one stung. It’s a long story, involving a stuffed ballot box in a student council election. And even though the statute of limitations has in all probability run out, it’s probably better left untold.
Before a fistfight could break out, I gestured to Mahoney. Stephanie was walking away. Mahoney bit his lower lip, but walked over to us anyway.
“Well, look who it is,” said Wharton. “Jerry Mahogany.”
“Knucklehead Smiff,” Mahoney answered, completing the ritual. The reference to the Paul Winchell Show was a long-standing bit between the two of them. They didn’t shake hands, but nodded at each other.
I recognized about twenty percent of the people in the room, and discounting for spouses, that still gave me a woefully low batting average. No one approached us—and I almost gave a long-lost-friend greeting to a man who turned out to be the bartender.
Still, the four of us—Mahoney, Friedman, Wharton and Tucker (that’s me)—managed to create a mini-reunion in our corner of the room. Old jokes, half-forgotten, were dragged out and given one more road test. Stories that were three-quarters forgotten (at least by me) were retold and embellished. Facts were disputed, opinions dismissed, and current lives and families, not to mention the past quarter century, completely ignored. And when Alan McGregor was spotted walking through the door, our mini-group was complete.
Mahoney, who had jump-started his sense of humor and assumed his customary court jester role, bellowed from across the room: “McGregor!” Heads turned. No one cared. McGregor reddened a bit, but walked over to us, smiling.
McGregor is about the same height as Mahoney, but not as muscular. He looks more like Clark Kent, and less like Superman.
In our group, no one member was more important than the rest, but it wouldn’t have been “Us” without McGregor. He provided the humanity in a gang of four who would have gone for the throat for the sake of a joke had he not been present. He also held his own, providing puns that would send lesser men running from the room.
He had barely caught up with the rest of the group (wife, three kids, some sort of financial job I didn’t understand) when I spotted a short, trim woman with casually coiffed brown hair standing by herself in a corner, nursing a ginger ale. I must have gasped audibly, because Mahoney turned in her direction, and broke into the nastiest grin I’d seen on his face in six months.
“Gail Rayburn,” he said, and the whole group turned first to her, then to me. I felt like my face was giving off heat beams. And they were enjoying my discomfort immensely.
Gail Rayburn, who had been considered something of a hot number during our tenure at Bloomfield High, had inexplicably decided one week during our senior year to make me her pet project. She found me at a party at Bobby Fox’s house, seduced me in some subtle way the beer wouldn’t allow me to remember (like saying “come here”), and then given me my first—and to date, last—hickey, a 24-karat beauty that I’d worn proudly for close to a week. She had, of course, then moved on to someone else, leaving me to look foolish, which was not unusual for me in high school, and continues to be not unusual for me to this day.
“You ought to go over and say hello,” said Wharton.
“Too bad you’re not wearing a turtleneck,” Friedman added. “Your wife might find out.”
“Don’t go over,” McGregor chimed in. “You don’t want to stick your neck out.”
I looked at Mahoney. “Why’d we come to this thing, again?” I asked.
“I’m having a good time,” he said. It occurred to me that he’d started having a good time when I started being the object of ridicule, but hey, what are best friends for?
I assessed them carefully. “I can do better than this group,” I said, and walked to where Gail was standing.
On my way, I noticed Stephanie standing among five or six ex-jocks desperately trying to suck in their guts. If you squinted, it was like a football huddle in Playboy. Except that Stephanie was dressed. Mostly.
Gail Rayburn, on the other hand, was completely dressed, and, at 43, gave the appearance of someone who was less a hot number (although still attractive) and more a moderately successful entrepreneur. She still had a figure she could show off, but had chosen not to do so, and was wearing her nametag on the lapel of a suit jacket. The tag read, “Gail Armstrong (Rayburn).”
“Gail,” I said, and she smiled, somewhat gratefully. I hoped I also noticed a flicker of recognition in her eye.
“Aaron Tucker,” she said after a moment. “It’s good to see you.”
She reached over and hugged me. Yes, the figure was still there. But it was a friendly hug, and I appreciated it as that.
“I’m glad you remember me,” I told her.
“Of course I do,” Gail said. “You were the nicest guy in the class.”
“In high school,” I told her, “that generally means you’re the one who gets the least. . .”
“Hickeys?” she asked, and we both laughed. I glanced over at the guys I’d left, and they were all looking at us, with adolescent grins on their faces. Gail raised her ginger ale to them in a toast. McGregor reddened and looked away.
“It’s twenty-five years later, and I still haven’t lived that down,” I said.
“Do you want to?” she asked.
“Not really.” Out of the corner of my ear, I heard a cell phone ring. Stephanie, at the center of the huddle, reached into her purse (she couldn’t possibly have had pockets in that outfit) and pulled out a phone.
“You looked so cute with that thing on your neck,” Gail continued. “You should have been fighting girls off after that.”
“Was that why you did it?” I asked. “I’ve often wondered. You just picked me out of the crowd. Were you trying to see if you could change my reputation?”
She laughed. “I just did it because I felt like it,” she said. “I was cementing my reputation. Your reputation didn’t need any help. You were always the one with the most integrity, the one who never compromised his principles.”
It was my turn to laugh. “It’s easy not to betray your ideals,” I said, “if nobody ever asks you to.”
“Don’t sell yourself short. You believed in things, and you stuck to them. You never did anything you thought was wrong. You had integrity.”
“Where’s my tape recorder when I need it?”
It was then that Stephanie made a sound that can’t actually be described accurately. A cross between a cough and a groan, it was something primal, and every head in the room turned toward her, wondering if a wild animal had been let loose in the room.
She was standing, holding the cell phone, but not next to her ear. She was staring at it in her hand, as if the phone itself, and not someone on the other end, had just told her something she couldn’t comprehend. Stephanie dropped the phone, then picked it up. One of the jocks tried to say something to her, but she waved him off and started toward the door.
The way to the door was right past where Gail and I were standing. Stephanie started to barrel past us, but I grabbed her arm. “Steph. . .” I said.
She didn’t look at me. I’m not sure she was actually talking to me.
“My husband,” she said. “My husband is. . . somebody killed him.”
Gail gasped. A couple nearby turned their heads away, asking each other if either knew what she meant. I maneuvered myself into Stephanie’s line of sight.
“Somebody killed your husband? As in. . .”
“Murder,” she said. “That’s what the police said.”
“Are they sure it was him? Maybe. . .”
She laughed, not a merry laugh. “It was him, all right,” she said, avoiding my gaze again. “Everybody in Washington knows Louis Gibson.” And she just kept walking, right out the door.
I looked at Gail. “Should I go after her?”
“Why? Are you guys really good friends?”
I thought about that. “No,” I said. “Before tonight, I hadn’t seen her in years.”
Mahoney beckoned me from across the room. He was pointing into the bar, which was adjacent to the banquet hall. There was a television over the bar, which normally this time of year might be showing a baseball playoff game. This time, a news report seemed to be on, and Mahoney was pointing to it.
“Is that her husband? Is that. . .?”
I looked at the face on the screen, which was identified as that of Louis Gibson. I was too far away to hear what was being said, but the inevitable crawl underneath the face indicated that this Gibson guy was the head of some political lobbying group in D.C. Mahoney walked to my side.
“Look at him,” he said. “He lost his hair, put on some pounds, but he’s the same asshole.”
Louis Gibson. It took me a while, because we had never used that name.
We always called him “Crazy Legs.”
Chapter
Four
“Crazy Legs?” Abby was on the floor in my office/our family room, doing stretching exercises. After the brouhaha at the reunion, Mahoney and I had left early, so I actually made it home before my wife had gone to bed, and filled her in on the melodrama.
“It’s a long story,” I said. “I’m not really sure who gave him the nickname. I think it was Friedman, but he denies it.”
“You guys never actually use each other’s first names, do you?” She lay down on the floor and began doing pelvic thrusts toward the ceiling. Wearing a pair of running shorts and a light blue T-shirt, she was making it difficult for me to concentrate on the evening’s bizarre events.
“It would be considered disrespectful,” I said. “Anyway, I think we ended up calling him ‘Crazy Legs’ because he was the least ‘Crazy Legs’ person we’d ever met, and besides, it pissed him off.”
“Always a. . . plus in your. . . social circles,” said my wife, thrusting harder now.
“You have no idea what you’re doing to me right now,” I told her.
“What makes. . . you think. . . I don’t?”
“You know, I did get home earlier than expected,” I pointed out. No sense wasting a perfectly good opportunity.
She got up and immediately bent at the waist, touching the floor in front of her with her palms, stretching her hamstrings. “A friend’s husband, a guy you actually know, is murdered, and you’re spending all your energy trying to proposition your own wife. That’s sad and flattering at the same time.”
“I can’t help it. Your legs can take my mind off of anything, except your. . .”
We both started, and looked up, when the doorbell rang. It was after eleven, and our doorbell never rings after eleven. It hardly ever rings before eleven. And at this hour, you could almost certainly rule out the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Abby stood up, and pointed to the door, as if I didn’t know what that bell going off in our living room might have meant.
I went to the door, cursing the fact that we have neither a peephole nor a door chain. For all I knew, Hannibal Lecter was standing on my doorstep, but a strange fear of insulting my guest would keep me from checking on his intention to eat my liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti. Being civil has its costs.
On the way, I tried to see through the divide between the drapes on our front window, but the BMW parked in front of our house was unfamiliar. I wondered what Hannibal was driving these days.
Turned out, it didn’t matter. I opened the door, and Stephanie Jacobs Gibson was standing there, still in the gasp-inducing clothes she had worn at the reunion. Her face, however, was a little wan, and seemed freshly damp on both cheeks.
“Steph,” I said, more loudly than was necessary. Across the room, Abby was already sizing up the competition. As if anyone could compete with Abby.
“I’m sorry it’s so late,” Stephanie said. “I wanted to call, but I didn’t know if that would wake the kids, or if you’d be awake, and then I needed to go somewhere, so I got out your business card. . .”
“Come on in,” said Abby. I stepped aside to let that happen, then closed the door behind Stephanie. Abby walked to her, took her hand, and introduced herself. My wife has roughly seventeen times the social skills that I have.
I got Stephanie a beer, at her request, and we sat in the living room, Steph and Abby on the sofa, and me on the floor facing them, backed up to the entertainment center, an imposing piece of furniture Abby and I have dubbed “The Monolith.”
“I’m so sorry to hear what happened,” Abigail started. “You must be. . .”
“Shocked,” Stephanie cut her off. “I’m shocked. But I’m not heartbroken. I’m not even sure I’m sorry.”
Abby and I took a minute to pretend we weren’t looking at each other, but Stephanie noticed.
“Don’t get me wrong, I never wished him dead,” she said. “But things hadn’t been good between Louis and me for a long time. He had affairs. A lot of them.”
I coughed, because it gave me time to think. Stephanie offered me a sip of her beer, but I shook my head. If I drink anything after nine o’clock, it’ll be followed by a Maalox chaser before bed. “I never knew you were married to Cra. . . to Louis.”
Stephanie grinned. “It’s okay, Aaron,” she said. “I know you called him Crazy Legs. Even though I never knew why.”
Abby stood up and walked to me, put a hand on top of my head, the way you would with a little boy who’d just done something precocious. “Aaron never knew why, either,” she told Steph. “He explained it to me, and I still don’t know why.” They shared an “oh, those men” look.
“How’d you end up married to Legs, anyway?” I asked, trying to shift the conversation away from me as the stereotypical man.
Stephanie stopped grinning and stared into the neck of her beer bottle for a moment. “Well, we dated a couple of times senior year after I broke up with Michael. I didn’t think much of it, but Louis. . . well, Louis was persistent. Anyway, after graduation, I went to Montclair State, back before it was a university, and Louis went to NYU. So he’d come over, or I’d go into the city, and after a while, it got to be a regular thing.”
I decided to ignore Abby’s look and ask a question. Hey, I’m a reporter. We do that. “I think what I meant was, what did you see in the guy? I mean, we always thought he was kind of. . .” I quickly remembered that Legs was dead, and that stopped me.
“. . . an asshole? Well, that’s because you were guys.”
“We still are. Kind of.”
“Louis was always nicer to a girl he wanted to impress than he was to anybody else,” Stephanie said. “You didn’t get to see what he was really like until he had gotten what he wanted out of you.”
Abby sat down next to me. “I assume you mean he wanted sex,” she said. Stephanie nodded. I gave Abigail an “I-thought-you-said-to-shut-up-and-let-her-talk” look, and she gave me a look with language you can’t print in a family newspaper.
“But it was more than that,” Steph went on. “He decided he wanted me to marry him, even after I slept with him. He thought I’d look good on his arm, so he kept up the charming act. God, this is an awful way to talk about the recently murdered, isn’t it?” She stood up. “Where do I throw out the beer bottle?” she asked, sniffling a bit.
“Don’t worry about it,” Abby said. “Do you want another one?” Stephanie shook her head. “I drank at the reunion, and I still have to drive back to the hotel tonight.”
“You could stay here,” Abby answered. “We have a sofa bed.”
“No. I’ve already taken up enough of your evening. I should go,” said Stephanie. “I have to drive back in the morning. Fact is, I would be driving back now, but both my sons are out of town, so I don’t have to be there for them until tomorrow.”
“Back to D.C.?” I asked, and she nodded. “Was Legs in the government?”
“He is. . . was, the head of a big political foundation, People For American Values,” said Stephanie. “He actually became pretty important. Not as important as he thought he was, but important.”
People for American Values. Somewhere in the back of my knee-jerk liberal mind I remembered something, but couldn’t classify it. I probably grimaced, and stored that bit of confusion away until I could ask Abby, who knows everything.
Stephanie picked up her jacket from the banister hook and put it on. “Isn’t there anything we can do to help you?” I asked, but she shook her head.
“You’ve already done it,” she said. “You were here when I needed you.”
“We live here,” I said.
She laughed, and kissed me on the lips, gently. It wasn’t a sexual thing, but it got Abigail’s attention. Nobody who isn’t me would have noticed, but she did narrow her eyes a millimeter or two.
“What bothers me more than anything else,” Stephanie said, “is why. I know Louis wasn’t the most lovable man on the planet, and he had political enemies, but everybody in D.C. has enemies. Why kill him?”
“The police will find out,” I said. “Legs was important enough that they can’t just forget about it.”
I opened the front door for her, and as she was about to walk out, she stopped. “Aaron,” she said.
I waited, but she didn’t say anything else. “What?”
“Aaron, you. . . you found out who killed that woman here, right? You could find out about Louis.”
I almost closed the door on her foot. “Oh, no. Steph, no. The Madlyn Beckwirth story, that was. . .” I looked to Abby for help, but after the kiss, my wife was not in a charitable mood. “That was a fluke, a mistake. I’m just a magazine writer. Honestly.”
But Stephanie hadn’t changed much since high school. She knew how to get what she wanted, and her wheels were already spinning fast. “One of the journalists Louis and I got to know is a features editor at Snapdragon. And besides the music stuff, you know they cover politics.”
Stephanie stepped back inside, and I closed the door, so the neighbors wouldn’t be distracted by my terrified screams so late at night. I felt the trap being sprung around me.
“I know, Steph, but really. I don’t know anything about politics. I write mostly about home entertainment equipment.”
Steph was having none of it. “You know about murder investigations, and you knew Louis. You could write it, Aaron. Don’t turn me down now. I can get Lydia from Snapdragon to call you tomorrow morning. Please.”
In times of crisis, my wife is always my strength. I looked at her for help, and as usual, she came through with flying colors.
“How much does Snapdragon pay per word?” she asked.
Chapter
Five
“Well, what did you want me to say?” asked Abby. I considered going downstairs for some butter, to see if it would melt in her mouth, but I was too tired. Stephanie had left, and we were in our bedroom, getting ready for bed a good two hours later than we’d expected.
“I was hoping you’d come up with a reason I can’t write a story about something I can’t possibly know about for a editor I don’t know, whose arm is getting twisted to hire me, at a magazine I’ve never worked for before. That’s all.” We start getting ready for bed most nights by making the bed, since we almost never do that when we get up in the morning.
“I thought you’d want to write it,” Abby said. She pulled the sheet smooth on her side, and started straightening out the blanket. “For crying out loud, Aaron, they pay two dollars a word, and you’ve got to figure this is at least a 3,000-word piece. That’s a nice chunk of change.” She had me there, but she couldn’t stop, which is always a fatal error. “Besides, I figured you’d want to do anything you could to help Ms. Cleavage.”
I pulled the blanket up on my side and started to take off my jeans. “So that’s it,” I said. “You know, it’s funny. I’ve never actually seen you jealous before. I wouldn’t have expected it. I’d have quicker expected it of me.” I hung the jeans on a hook sticking out of the closet door. We live in a very classy house.
Abby satisfied herself that the bed was now acceptable, and slid off the gym shorts she had on, then started looking around the room for her pajamas. “I’m not jealous,” she said casually. “I just find it amusing how easily you can be played.”
“Played?” I stopped looking for a T-shirt disgusting enough to sleep in, and walked to her side of the bed. “What do you mean, played?”
“Oh, come on,” my wife chuckled. “She bats her eyes, hikes up her boobs, and does that, ‘oh Aaron, you’re the only one who can help me’ thing, and you go right for it.”
“She has no reason to ‘play me,’ as you so endearingly put it.”
“She wants you to investigate her husband’s death,” Abby said. “She wants you because she knows she can supervise the investigation as long as you’re watching her bust line instead of the facts.” Abby knelt down to look under the bed.
“Her bust line is a fact. Well, two facts actually. Besides, why does Steph need to supervise the investigation?”
“Steph is from D.C. All those people are control freaks.”
I sighed, which I don’t do often. “She’s not from D.C.—she’s from Bloomfield, New Jersey.”
“And you’ve wanted to hump her ever since she lived there.”
There are few things my wife does that seriously annoy me, but when she talks the way she thinks men talk, she can piss me off with the best of them. Mostly because I don’t talk like that, and I’m pretty sure I’m a man. She found her pajama bottoms under the bed, and when she stood up, holding them, I was standing within a foot of her, looking right into her eyes. Abby was a little startled, but she grinned, thinking she’d scored a withering blow.
“I’d like to point out that I was looking for a way not to help her when you volunteered me,” I told her, my breathing getting a little heavy. “Now, you listen to me. There is no one more beautiful, no one smarter, no one sexier, no one funnier, no one I’d rather be with on this planet, than you. You are the absolute center of my life, and I would gladly devote all my time on this earth to convincing you that nobody has ever loved anyone as much as I love you, but unfortunately, we need to sleep, eat, and pay the mortgage. So stop being a moron.”
She took a moment, smiled, and dropped her pajama bottoms on the floor.
“Come on,” Abby said. “Let’s mess up the bed again.”
And somehow, I forgot to ask whether she was familiar with People for American Values.
Chapter
Six
Lydia Soriano, Snapdragon’s features editor, called me at ten the next morning. Impressive, especially considering it was a Sunday. Stephanie, or Crazy Legs, must have had more clout than I’d estimated.
“Mr. Tucker, we’re interested in a 5,000-word piece on the murder of Louis Gibson. I understand you have some background on the subject.” Lydia had a very businesslike voice, but you could tell there was a human being in there somewhere.
“Call me Aaron. Please.” I started. “And actually, no. I don’t have any background at all. What I have is a knowledge of. . . Louis from his high school days and a very loose friendship with his wife from around the same time.”
“I understand that you’re reluctant,” she said without missing a beat. “But I’m told that you have investigated some murders before.”
Stephanie must have been very persuasive. “I’ve investigated exactly one murder, and I managed to solve it by annoying the murderers enough that they came after me. I wouldn’t exactly call that a stellar record.” I wanted Snapdragon to know exactly what it was getting, if it was getting anything.
“You know, Aaron, you keep this up, and I’m going to feel like you don’t want to work for us.” Well, what do you know? There was a sense of humor there after all.
“I’ve always wanted to work for Snapdragon. In fact, I’ve queried you guys maybe fifty times in the past five years. I just want you to have an accurate picture,” I told Lydia. “If you hire me, you’re paying, um. . .”
“Ten thousand dollars.”
I took a cleansing breath, the only useful thing I got from being a Lamaze coach twice. “. . . Ten thousand dollars, for someone who is not an investigative reporter, a crime reporter or a political reporter, and you’ll be hiring him to investigate a crime that is, in all likelihood, politically motivated. Don’t do it just because Stephanie Jacobs told you to.”
“I’m not going to pretend I didn’t call because of Stephanie’s reputation,” said Lydia. “But I do the assigning around here, not her. And it’s my ass on the line if you turn out to be a screw-up.”
“Don’t mince words, Lydia. Come right out and say it.”
She chuckled. “Aaron, have you ever been a magazine editor?”
“Not on your level, no.”
“One of the things you have to rely on is your own instinct. I called you because Stephanie recommended you. I did it because she’s a friend, and because her cooperation is going to be central to a story that everybody who covers politics is going to want. We’re tired of being thought of as Rolling Stone’s slow-witted cousin, and we want to make a big splash. She’s giving you exclusive access to her, and ‘exclusive’ means exclusive. She isn’t talking to anybody else. Also, I read as many of your clips as I could get off the Web. But still, I wouldn’t offer you the story if I called you and you sounded like you were going to read through the police reports on the Internet and write a story about the extinguishing of a strong voice for the fundamentalist right on Capitol Hill. Frankly, I thought Louis Gibson was. . .”
“. . . An asshole?”
“Pretty much.”
“He certainly was one in high school, and I haven’t seen him since then, but I’m willing to bet he got worse. Am I allowed to write that he was an asshole?”
Lydia didn’t miss a beat. “If you can back it up with facts, sure.”
“Well, stop beating around the bush,” I said. “Ask me if I want the ten grand.”
Chapter
Seven
Monday morning was the usual blur of sandwiches made and bagged, drink boxes, water bottles, snacks and apples placed in lunch bags and boxes, clothing located, teeth brushed, cereal poured, medication dispensed (Ethan gets 15 milligrams of Ritalin every morning), hugs, kisses, hair brushed, shoes lost, shoes found, more hugs, and pushing the kids out the front door. All before eight in the morning.
I had an assignment from the Newark Star-Ledger about new video products sold in New Jersey. I work quite frequently for the Star-Ledger’s “Today” section, which concerns itself with lighter, feature material. Travel, parenting, consumer issues, that sort of thing. In this case, the section was about advances in video technology (there hadn’t been any lately, so I was making it up), and I’d been given a list of four people the paper would like me to interview. I had reached two, and needed to make a visible effort at the other two before writing. The deadline was Wednesday, today was Monday, so I assumed this would be no problem.
Still, it was only eight in the morning, and you can’t count on anyone being in their office before nine, so I started my day, as I usually do, with the New York Times crossword puzzle. I make a big show, when asked, about how it helps me to think about words and increases my vocabulary, but the fact is the puzzle is a good way to kill time and postpone having to do anything that approaches work. Does it improve my vocabulary and get me thinking about words? Sure. Does that make even a one-percent difference in what I would write about video technology for “Today”? Get real.
So, I was attempting to find a six-letter word for “dummies,” and failing miserably, when the phone rang. Our newly installed Caller ID box informed me that the incoming call was from the Buzbee School main office, and at 8:30 a.m., that is never good news.
I’m used to getting calls from the school. Ethan suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome, a neurological disorder like a high-functioning form of autism, which manifests itself in many ways, almost all of them socially unacceptable, or at least odd. The school calls often, if just to let me know when he’s having a rough day. A paraprofessional named Wilma Coogan follows him around all day, and will frequently call me with a question, or when a situation arises she hasn’t seen before. So I breathed a long sigh to gird myself for what was clearly going to be a rough day.
“Hi, Aaron, it’s Anne Mignano.” Uh-oh. The principal herself. Now I was really in trouble.
“Who did he set on fire, Anne?”
“Don’t worry,” Anne said. “Ethan’s fine.”
That stumped me. If Ethan was fine, what did Anne want to talk about? “Is Leah okay?”
“Yes. In fact, this doesn’t have anything to do with either one of your children.”
Well, that made sense. If it doesn’t have anything to do with my kids, clearly the principal should get on the phone to me immediately. “What’s going on?” I asked.
“Can you come over here for a few minutes?” she said. “I have something I need to ask you about.” I was surprised, but didn’t say anything to indicate it. It was a short walk to school.
Five minutes later, having given up on “_od__s,” I found myself seated in a chair in front of Anne Mignano’s desk. And our principal, who takes great pains to be unflappable, looked very flapped. Not that the casual observer could tell, but I was an old hand: Anne’s dark blond hair was just a bit mussed. Her left hand was playing with a paper clip on a desk that rarely, if ever, saw a paper clip out of place. And she was leaning forward in her chair just a little more than she should, giving me the intimation of urgency.
“Is something wrong, Mrs. Mignano?”
“No, not really,” she said, her voice brittle. “Well, maybe. It’s something I need some help with.”
Whoa. If Anne Mignano, who can stare down five hundred seven-to-twelve year-olds on a rainy day with no movie, is admitting she needs help, there must be a catastrophe of biblical proportions on the way. I gave passing thought to whether Home Depot carries Do-It-Yourself Ark kits.
“You know I’ll do what I can.”
“Good.” She stood, and closed her office door. There was so much silence in the room, Harpo Marx and Marcel Marceau would have screamed to break the tension. Anne sat back down, and leaned forward again. “I need you to investigate something for me.”
“Anne, you know I’m not. . .”
“This has to be done discreetly, Aaron, and can’t be seen as an official inquiry. I need someone who knows how to ask questions without giving away too much information, or drawing attention to himself.”
It occurred to me that a guy who practically dares murderers to a duel usually draws some attention, but I held my tongue. Turned out my tongue was slippery and disgusting, so I let go.
“What is it that needs investigation?” I asked.
“You understand, then, that what I’m about to tell you can’t leave this room?”
“Anne, stop talking like The Spy Who Came in from the Cloakroom. You know you can trust me—now, what are you trusting me with?”
She searched my eyes for a few seconds, then drew in a breath. “Aaron. We have had a problem with stink bombs.”
Surely, I’d heard her wrong. Maybe she meant “sink bombs.” Perhaps a sink in the boy’s room had blown up, and she wanted me to find out who the culprit might be. Or Anne might have said she had a problem with Simba, which would mean a vicious tiger loose in the halls of the school.