“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.
“Stink bombs?”
“Yes.”
Okay, so I’d heard right. “Stink bombs.” You can never be too sure.
“Someone threw a stink bomb into the girls’ locker room during soccer practice on Friday. It was the third one this month— there was one in the boy’s bathroom on the second floor and one in the gymnasium. I’m surprised you haven’t heard about it.” Anne seemed disappointed, already, in my investigative abilities. “We spent the whole weekend fumigating in there, and the other two still haven’t been entirely eradicated.”
“So you want me to. . . what? Go around sniffing kids to see who smells bad?”
She smiled, but not sincerely. And Anne isn’t as good at insincerity as a real politician. “I know it doesn’t sound like much,” she said.
“It doesn’t sound like much? We have schools in this state where kids walk in every morning through metal detectors, and we’re getting all bent out of shape over a few stink bombs?”
“I’m afraid so,” she said softly. “One of the boys in the bathroom when the bomb went off has a mother on the Board of Education. A girl in the locker room’s father is on the Board of Assessors, and, well, the science teacher was quite angry himself.” I knew Mr. Marlton—he wore a lab coat wherever he went and was last pleased with something around the time Madame Curie discovered radium.
“. . . And they’re putting pressure on you to bring the culprit, or culprits, to justice? Is that it?”
In Midland Heights, where New Age parents keep their kids away from red meat and the lack of organic tomatoes at the supermarket is a major scandal, three unanswered stink bombs could be enough to put a principal’s job on the line, if—as seemed to be the case here—the wrong people’s children were somehow involved. Put enough children with enough connections in the line of fire, and anything could happen. Word had it that a former health inspector was once fired for getting annoyed by a resident’s constant calls about spiders in her neighbor’s apartment because he told her to “teach them to tap dance and get them on Letterman.” Anne could investigate, but her hands were tied. An independent observer (like a freelance writer, for example) could, in theory, use methods that weren’t exactly in the Marquis of Queensberry's rulebook, and if I were caught or killed, the principal could disavow all knowledge of my actions. Clever.
“Something like that,” she said. “Can you help? Will you help?”
“How much time do I have?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I mean, I don’t seriously believe the board would act against an administrator on something like this, but. . .” Anne let her voice trail off.
“I assume I’m not on the school’s payroll,” I said.
“No. I’m asking for a favor,” said Anne.
“That’s my going rate,” I said. “Tell me what you know.”
Chapter
Eight
It turned out the six-letter word for “dummies”—the crossword puzzle item that had so stymied me—was “dodoes.” That crazy, whimsical New York Times.
I spent the rest of that morning on the two phone calls for the Star-Ledger story and trying to absorb my other two current assignments. For one, I was being asked to find out who killed a relatively major political figure, and write about it because I knew him and his now-widow in high school. I had just about no experience doing such things, but was being paid $10,000 for my on-the-job training.
On the other hand, I had plenty of experience in finding out which little kid has been mischievous, because I have been a parent for twelve years. So discovering who had chucked the stink bombs into various rooms in the Buzbee School was considerably better suited to my talents. Of course, for this I was being paid nothing. The fact that I’d been asked to do it at all (or that anyone had been asked) was the hardest part to believe.
I decided to start on the paying job first, and put in a call to my friend Mitch Davis, who works for USA Today in the Washington, D.C. area. But Mitch was out, so I settled for his voice mail, and sat down to ponder.
Pondering is what I’m best at in the morning. Before two in the afternoon, I’m useless as a writer unless there’s a deadline to meet. So I thought, and I put music on (since I’m not allowed to play what I like while the kids are home), and I had a Healthy Choice frozen lunch while watching a rerun of Hill Street Blues on Bravo. Then, I reread the scene I’d written yesterday on my latest screenplay.
Screenwriting isn’t the kind of thing you do because you want to—it’s the kind of thing you do because if you don’t, the story will leak out through your ears. I’ve been writing screenplays for upwards of 20 years in the increasingly vain hope that some maniac producer will read one, decide I’m worth throwing some money at, and eventually make a movie. So far, I’ve been given money exactly three times for options—a kind of rental agreement producers use to keep you from selling your script to someone else for a year or so—and come close to snagging a couple of other options. I’ve made so much money screenwriting that we were actually able to send Eth
an to a day camp for kids with neurological problems last summer. Prorated over time, my screen-writing wages are just a couple of cents an hour below what slaves generally get.
What all this means is: don’t expect rationality when discussing the “art” of writing for the movies. It comes from a deep, abiding love for the form that began roughly at age three, when my parents took me to see Pinocchio, and was cemented into place when I realized someone actually wrote this stuff, around the time I first saw North by Northwest. Cary Grant could be charming as all get-out, but without Ernest Lehman to tell him what to say, he’d never have made it out of that auction in Chicago alive. If you haven’t seen it, go rent the DVD. NOW!
I read over the previous day’s work, and it was actually better than I’d expected. After the Madlyn Beckwirth mess, I’d tossed the romantic comedy I’d been laboring with, and started a murder mystery. That was easier, since the true story was so bizarre, I only had to change some details and move a few characters around to avoid being sued. The writing was going well.
Today’s task involved a tricky scene that included a lot of exposition. The problem with exposition, or plot points, in a script is that the last thing you want an audience to feel is that they’re being told, and not shown, a story. You don’t want your characters explaining everything in dialogue. The best way to convey the story point is in a visual, but that’s not always possible. So, you have to hide your exposition in jokes or create a diversion, a task for the characters to perform while they’re talking. An interesting setting or a subplot for the scene can disguise exposition, too, but it all has to be worked out ahead of time. And in this case, I was having trouble coming up with the proper diversion.
I’d settled on one—having the characters perform a piece of home improvement while discussing the plot—and started writing when, true to form, Ethan pushed the front door open and stomped into the house. My son doesn’t walk, he stomps. It does-n’t mean anything—it’s not indicative of his mood. Asperger’s kids aren’t as in touch with their bodies as the rest of us, and Ethan is probably unaware that he’s making enough noise to be heard three blocks away.
Sure enough, all the stomping hadn’t meant a thing—Ethan breezed in the door with a sunny, “hi, Dad,” and immediately set out to do his homework, which he announced was “the easiest thing since they started giving out homework.” For math class, he had to write a poem about his favorite number. When I was in school, you had to do math for math, but that was a long time ago.
It was just as well that this was Ethan’s assignment and not mine, anyway. I can’t compose a decent rhyme about anything, let alone my favorite number. My few pitiful attempts at song-writing in college were enough to convince me to stick to prose.
Ethan, however, is blessed with a mind that can toss off complex, interesting metaphors as easily as. . . um, something easy. Okay, if I’d finished that simile, you’d get the idea.
He had just about finished his “Ode to Thirteen” when Leah pushed the door open and dragged her tiny, weary self into the living room, then flopped down on the bottom stair. My daughter, who wants to be an actress, has yet to master the art of subtlety.
“How was your day, Squishy-Face?” I asked. It’s best to start with an endearing nickname. It sets up a good barometer for the child’s mood. And with children, mood is everything.
“Good.” Okay, at least I knew something. Of course, Leah always says her day was “good,” even when something truly horrific—like a substitute teacher—has befallen her. Once, on a day when her beloved Mrs. Antonioni was absent, Leah actually had to spend five minutes in detention, something she considers an unpardonable shame that will tarnish her life until that fateful day one of her great-grandchildren ferrets out the truth. And the whole class had been detained—Leah hadn’t been singled out.
“Anything happen that I need to know about?” She shook her head, and started to dig through her backpack, which was hanging on the lowest protrusion of our cast-iron banister. She sighed, evidently with great meaning.
“What’s the matter, Puss?” She knows I almost never call her “Leah” unless I’m annoyed with her, which I am roughly every three months. But she didn’t answer, got out her math book, and headed toward the kitchen, so as to stay out of Ethan’s way. The two of them doing homework in the same room is not a pretty picture.
I was about to follow her and get a more detailed explanation of her mood when the phone rang. The caller ID box indicated the caller was “Out of Area,” which is really helpful. But luckily, when I picked the phone up, Mitch Davis was at the other end.
“I don’t care if I am your class correspondent, I haven’t heard from any Rutgers people,” he began, by way of a greeting. Mitch is a classic, old-style newspaperman—unkempt, hard drinking, and outwardly gruff. If he put on a seersucker suit and a porkpie hat, he’d be Carl Kolchak, the Night Stalker.
“I’m not calling about alumni,” I assured him. “I’m calling to pick your brain on Washington, D.C. police activity.”
“This for a story?”
“No. I’ve developed an overwhelming interest in cities that once busted their own mayor for drug use, and I thought I’d start at the top.”
“I’m not going to help you on a story,” said Davis. “Why should I give my sources to the competition? Besides, I thought you wrote about Palm Pilots and what’s great about New Jersey. What are you doing talking to cops?”
I filled him in on my Snapdragon assignment, leaving out my ties to Stephanie and Crazy Legs. His voice rose about an octave when I suggested he let me know who was conducting the Gibson investigation.
“The biggest cop story to hit D.C. in ten years, and you want me to hand you the sources? Why don’t you act like a reporter and get your own, you slacker?” Davis always was one for flattery.
“I’m not the competition, you Daily Planet reject. I’m writing for a monthly that’s not going to publish until you’ve already moved on to the next scandal inside your Belt Buckle.”
“Beltway.”
“Whatever. You’re not covering the story yourself, anyway. Besides, you know as well as I do that I could get all this information off the Internet in about 20 minutes if I wanted to. But you’re faster, and more fun to annoy.” College friends were just made to needle. You didn’t know them in years that were as embarrassing as your high school friends, but you still have plenty of blackmail material that their present employers, spouses, or children would find interesting.
Davis sighed. “Oh, all right. It’s nothing you wouldn’t get from reading USA Today tomorrow.”
“Make up your mind.”
“Funny. When you grow up, maybe you can write comedy. Okay. The chief investigator for the D.C. cops is Francis Xavier McCloskey, known in these parts as Fax McCloskey because nobody ever actually sees him—they just get his messages from their fax machines. Fax works out of the Capitol area headquarters, and I’ll give you the number once I dig it out. But you won’t get Fax on the line, anyway.” Once you get Davis going, you don’t have to work very hard. He does it all for you.
“Who will I get on the line?”
“Sergeant Mason Abrams. You’re better off with him, anyway. He’s the administrative sergeant in the homicide division, and he’ll know what’s going on, even if Fax is the one doing the actual investigation.”
“So, why don’t I just go to Abrams first?” I asked.
I could hear the condescension in Davis’ voice. “Because then Fax won’t be able to show you what a busy guy he is by passing you off to Abrams. Besides, this way you’ll get on his fax list, and you’ll be getting messages from him when we’re at our 50-year college reunion.”
“Which should be a couple of weeks from now.”
“Awwwwwwwww. Feelin’ kinda down, Aaron?” Davis had as much tolerance for self-pity as he did for sloppy lead paragraphs or unattributed quotes.
“Just tired. Thanks for the help, Mitch.”
“We live to serv
e.”
He gave me the phone numbers I needed, grumbled again about the state of journalism in America today, and got off the phone. I hung up and looked in on my children. Ethan had written his poem, in his barely readable scrawl, and had moved on to the most important thing in his world, his Play Station. He would be totally devoted to Play Station 2, but we insist on his paying for such things himself, and $200 is hard to come by when your allowance is $5 a week, especially if your parents frequently forget to pay up.
Leah was bent over the kitchen table, which was covered with papers. A pencil she had sharpened almost to the point of a surgical instrument was in her hand. Tears were splashing down her cheeks, but she was silent.
“What’s the matter, Puss?”
“I CAN’T DO IT!” she screamed, and put her head down amid the papers. I’ve seen this particular soap opera before, so I adopted my best Robert Young “Father Knows Best” manner (although I didn’t have time to change into a sweater with patches on the elbows or learn to smoke a pipe).
“Can’t do what?” I asked, sitting down next to her.
“THIS!!!!” She waved a worksheet at me. From this distance, and with the violent shaking she was giving it, I would have found it easier to read a sheet in ancient Aramaic. But I was willing to believe it was related to mathematics in some way.
“What are you supposed to do?”
“I DON’T KNOW!” Oh, that. I snatched the sheet out of her hand when it came by my face again. It contained all of three word problems.
“Have you read this?”
“YES!” she screamed, and flung her head back in what she thought was a melodramatic gesture. It looked more like a supermodel tossing her hair back.
“I’ll bet you didn’t. Look, what do the instructions say?” I admit it, my teeth were pressed together pretty hard. It’s easier to maintain my calm with Leah than with Ethan, but a temper’s a temper. And I have one.
Surprisingly, she decided to give up the soap opera act and actually do what I’d suggested. “Each of these problems has a fraction in it,” she read in a singsong voice. “Decide which number is the denominator and write it in the space below.” Leah’s eyes widened and she pointed an accusing finger at the paper. “See? They want me to do fractions!”
A Farewell to Legs Page 4