“No, they don’t,” I said. “You could if you had to, but that’s not what they’re asking. They just want to know which number in the fraction is the denominator.”
“What’s a denominator?”
I sighed. “What did you talk about in class today?”
“The top number and bottom number.”
“What’s the bottom number called?” I said. I’d have drawn her a diagram, but my artistic skills are roughly on the stick-figure level.
“The denominator!” she shouted happily, then stopped. Her eyes narrowed. “So what do I do?”
“Oh, come on,” I grumbled, walking out of the kitchen to my office. She followed me, waving the paper. “Daddy! How do I do this?”
It took me a few more minutes to convince her that this was the easiest homework assignment in history, and she went happily to work. So did I, only not as happily.
I started by calling Lt. Francis Xavier McCloskey, and, sure enough, was told by an actual human police department employee that Lt. McCloskey was “in a situational meeting about a case,” but that I could talk to Sgt. Abrams. I asked him to transfer me, and what do you know, he did. After taking my fax number.
“Sgt. Abrams.”
“Sergeant, my name is Aaron Tucker. I’m working on an article for Snapdragon Magazine about the Louis Gibson case, and I was wondering. . .”
“Everybody’s wondering. Talk to the public information officer.” Abrams’ voice belied his tough talk. It was light, even cheerful. And there was no hesitation in his answers—he wasn’t thinking about what the truth was going to sound like before he told it to you.
“Come on, Sergeant. I’ve already been blown off by Lt. McCloskey, and the P.I. officer is just going to tell me it’s an ongoing investigation. I need to get my feet wet, and I’m behind everybody else on the story by two and a half days. So how ’bout just giving me what every other reporter in the whole world already knows.”
There was a long pause, and I got the distinct impression that I could hear Abrams grinning. Straight-talkers generally appreciate talking to one of their own kind.
“Oh, okay.” The grin broke through his voice again. “You got a pencil?”
“That’s very amusing. Remind me to include it in my series on the Wit and Wisdom of the Capital Police.”
“I was going to do you a favor, Tucker. Try and keep that in mind.”
He was right. “Okay. I’m an idiot. So what were you going to say back when I was just an annoying reporter?”
Abrams chuckled. “Louis Gibson was killed with a six-inch kitchen knife to the chest while, um, relaxing in the apartment of one Ms. Cheri—that’s C-H-E-R-I—Braxton, an administrative assistant in the human resources office of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.”
“She’s a secretary for the personnel department at HUD.”
“Don’t tell her that,” Abrams replied. “Ms. Braxton is very adamant about being an administrative assistant in the human resources office of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.”
“I’ll try to keep that in mind. I’m also willing to speculate that Mr. Gibson was not, um, relaxing in Ms. Braxton’s spacious living room. And I’ll bet my last dollar she’s a blonde.”
“You would be correct, both times. He was in the bed, and the only thing he was wearing was an appalling comb-over.”
“And a six-inch kitchen knife,” I reminded him. “Which, I’ll go out on another limb, did not have any fingerprints on it.”
Abrams voice reflected his admiration. “Your instincts are amazing, Tucker,” he said. “How have the police managed to get by without your penetrating insights?”
“Please,” I said. “I’m blushing.”
“Thank god I don’t have videophone. Now. Ms. Braxton did not hear or see the attack, she says, because she was in the shower when it happened.”
“Could the cops confirm that?” I asked.
“Well, the officers on the scene couldn’t pinpoint the time of death that closely, but they did confirm that she was wearing a bathrobe when they got there, and she was unquestionably naked and wet underneath it,” said Abrams.
My eyebrows shot up, giving Abrams another reason to be glad he didn’t have videophone. “They checked?”
“They didn’t have to. She hadn’t bothered to close the robe when they arrived.”
“Wow.”
“That’s what they tell me. There are no suspects at this time, and yes, this is an ongoing investigation, so there’s a limit to the amount of information I can give you. Any other questions?”
“Just one. Is Ms. Braxton a real blonde?”
“Funny,” Abrams said, “it isn’t in the reports.”
Chapter
Nine
That night, we were experimenting with the idea of the whole family eating dinner together, and it was going swimmingly, except for Ethan’s palpable anxiety that he would miss the opening credits of The Simpsons rerun that started at seven. He practically broke a sweat shoveling food into his mouth with one eye on the digital microwave clock.
Leah, meanwhile, was giving us a sneak preview of what she’ll be like as an adolescent, rolling her eyes every time we asked a question and emphasizing every word she spoke to us when she’d deign to grace the conversation with her chirpy little voice.
“May I please be excused?” Ethan asked, eyeballs nearly popping out of his head with anticipation. Problem was, his mouth was still full, so it came out “maya pease be estude?” Luckily, Abby speaks fluent gibberish. She’s been living with me a long time.
“Not just yet,” she said. “Chew and swallow your food first, wash it down with some water, and wipe your mouth with a napkin.” Asperger’s kids, generally speaking, don’t like to watch people eat, and they don’t see much point in sitting at the table after they’ve finished eating. Not to mention, Bart Simpson, Ethan’s role model, was about to start writing on that blackboard to signal the seventeenth rerun of an episode Ethan still doesn’t entirely understand.
He grumbled a little, but that was muffled by macaroni and cheese, so it was easy to ignore. Ethan did follow his mother’s instructions to the letter, though. As with many autism spectrum children, Asperger’s kids tend to be very specific about doing what they’re told, and do not vary in the least from instructions. He chewed, swallowed, drank, and wiped, an inch from hyperventilating.
“Now may I please be excused?”
Abigail nodded wearily. I try to stay away from such conversations whenever possible, and was staring down at my plate to avoid having to look at Leah, an adorable little girl who has the table manners of a rhinoceros. Ethan leapt up and started to run for the living room, before Abby reminded him to clear his plate from the table. With mere seconds to spare, he made it to the television, and Nirvana.
“So, did you have a lot of homework today?” Abby asked Leah, who was chewing so slowly it was impossible to tell if she was still alive.
“I told you!” she shouted. “I had three pages!”
“You didn’t tell me,” Abigail said with no outward trace of tension.
“I told him!” Leah pointed at me.
“Him?” I looked down at myself. “Him? I used to be ‘Daddy.’”
She rolled her eyes and exhaled. Parents can be so inconvenient.
Abby’s eyes had a faraway look, which meant she was trying not to scream. “All right, young lady, just exactly what has put you into such a mood that. . .”
The front door flung itself open, and Leah’s best friend Melissa flung herself through it. Most of the people we know have given up on the formality of ringing the doorbell or knocking, and Melissa is through that door so many times a day I’ve been thinking of putting in a turnstile.
Leah’s face brightened like a Hawaiian sky after a thunderstorm. “MELLIE!” she screamed, and ran toward her counterpart. They hugged like they hadn’t seen each other two hours earlier, which they had. The remainder of Leah’s dinner went unto
uched, and Abby sighed, scraped it into the garbage under the sink, and put the plate in the dishwasher.
It was just a little bit of a surprise when the front door opened again, and Melissa’s mother Miriam Bonet walked in, with equal disregard for our doorbell. I made a mental note to test the button later to make sure it was still operating. Miriam and her husband Richard have become the closest friends we have in Midland Heights, and she was carrying a small box that looked like a mini-cooler, except that it had ventilation holes in its sides. Inside it was a lizard.
“Is that IT?” Leah squealed. She raced to Melissa’s mother before Miriam even got a chance to take her jacket off. Miriam, normally a rational person, was beaming from ear to ear. She nodded.
“This is it, honey,” she told my daughter. Abby walked to the dining room, where the females had converged. Leah was busy thanking Miriam so profusely it bordered on embarrassing. Ethan stayed in the living room, where the trials and tribulations of yellow people with blue hair who say “d’oh!” were far more real to him than anything going on in the next room.
“I didn’t know you were bringing it tonight,” Abby told our guest.
“I didn’t know she was bringing it at all,” I chimed in from the kitchen, where I was frantically loading dishes into the dishwasher, to better hide from “company” the fact that we load our sink with dirty dishes until someone makes us stop.
Miriam stopped and looked at my wife. “You didn’t tell him?” she asked.
“I told him about the lizard,” Abby stammered. “I didn’t tell him you were bringing it.”
“Why didn’t you tell him?” Miriam asked.
“He is right here in the room,” I reminded them.
“It’s simple,” said Abigail. “Miriam knew all about the whole gecko thing because Melissa already has one. So when we decided Leah could have one. . .”
“When we decided?”
Abby gave me her “the-child-is-watching-so-please-play-along” look. “Yes, when we decided, Miriam offered to buy it, and bring all the equipment, as an early birthday present for Leah.”
“Her birthday’s five months from now,” I pointed out.
“A very early birthday present.”
“It’s so cute!” my daughter was gushing. “Is it a boy or a girl?”
I considered answering “yes,” but more sensible heads prevailed. Miriam actually looked a little embarrassed. “Well, we’re not really sure yet, Leah,” she said. “We’ll have to give it a few months, and then we can look, maybe with a magnifying glass, and find out.”
“You know what they’re looking for,” giggled Melissa, and Leah laughed along with her. I finished loading the dishwasher and turned it on.
Leah walked in with the cage. “Look, Daddy,” she said. “She’s so cute!”
“I thought you didn’t know if it was a boy or a girl,” I reminded her.
“I’ve decided it’s a girl,” she said practically. “Look, Daddy, look!”
I have to admit to backing up just a tad. “It’s really nice, honey,” I said. “Why don’t you take it up to your room and find a spot for it to live?”
Miriam had brought a small fish tank and other equipment for the tiny reptile, and she set it up on Leah’s desk, with a heat lamp to keep the lizard, which the girls named E-LIZ-abeth, warm. I stayed in the kitchen, cleaning up, while the estrogen brigade set up E-LIZ-abeth with her new home. After a few minutes, Abby and Miriam walked downstairs and joined me at the kitchen table. Miriam put a small plastic container in the refrigerator.
“Is that the. . .”
“Worms,” Miriam said. “And they have to be wriggling, or the lizard won’t eat them.”
“This is a lovely pet,” I told my wife.
Abby started to make coffee, since she is the coffee drinker in the house. I tend to content myself with Diet Coke, but it was evening, and any caffeine at all would keep me up until roughly Thursday. So I abstained. Miriam sat down at the kitchen table with me.
“I’m actually glad you came,” I said to Miriam. “Leah’s been P. . . P. . . P. . . PMS all afternoon.”
Abigail turned the coffeemaker on and looked at me. “You still don’t get it, do you?”
“Less and less, as I get older. Get what?”
“She was nervous because she knew Miriam was coming with the lizard, and she was afraid of you.” Abby reached into the freezer and pulled out a box of Girl Scout cookies, which she started to arrange on a plate. Girl Scout cookies must be eaten frozen, or not at all.
“She’s afraid of me?”
“You’re the one who didn’t want the gecko,” Miriam said. “Leah knows that, and she thinks that if you say no, she can’t have it.”
“She’s right. If I had said no, she couldn’t have it. But I did-n’t say no. In fact, I don’t remember being given a choice.”
“Leah didn’t know that,” Abby said, putting the cookies down. “She still thinks you’re going to throw the lizard out of the house.”
I groaned a little. “As long as I don’t have to walk it or anything, I don’t care. I take no responsibility for that animal. It lives or dies based on how well Leah takes care of it.”
Miriam always knows how to change the subject—all she has to do is ask about me. “So, what are you working on these days?” she asked.
I told her about Legs and my conversation with Abrams. “You’re a political science professor,” I reminded her, in case she’d forgotten her profession since leaving work today. “Who would Louis Gibson’s enemies be?”
“You’ll notice the word ‘science’ in there, Aaron,” she said, nibbling a tiny bite off a Thin Mint in the time it would take me to eat three cookies. “I don’t deal in minute-to-minute politics— I’m teaching theory.”
“Fine. Give me a theory about who Legs’ enemies might be, based on his politics.”
Abby frowned, but Miriam sat and thought for a moment. Abby got up to retrieve the coffeepot, which had filled.
“Anybody to the left of Mussolini would be an enemy of Louis Gibson,” she said. “You remember that rumor about the Supreme Court nominee about five years ago?”
I resisted the impulse to smite myself in the forehead. “Of course! I knew I remembered that People for The Values We Decided Are American thing! Was he behind that rumor?”
“What rumor?” Abby asked, pouring a mug of coffee for herself and one for Miriam.
“Behind it?” Miriam said. “He leaked it himself.”
“Legs Gibson told the press about that?” I was torn between pride that I knew someone that famous, and revulsion that I knew someone that Fascist.
“What rumor?” asked Abby, putting the mugs down and sitting with us at the table.
“Oh, you remember,” Miriam said. “During the hearings for that woman the Democrats were trying to get on the Supreme Court. And all of a sudden this article appears in the Washington Times about how it was rumored she’d had an abortion when she was seventeen. . .”
“Oh my god, that rumor?!” said Abby. She turned to me. “You’re telling me you went to high school with the sexist idiot who kept Madeline Crosby off the Supreme Court?”
“I didn’t actually go to school with him,” I defended myself. “He was one town over.”
Miriam took a sip of coffee and nodded her head—apparently Abby had manipulated the brew properly. (You can’t prove it by me, I think coffee tastes like hot, liquid dirt.) “Well, all you needed to hear was the words ‘Supreme Court nominee’ and ‘abortion’ in the same sentence, and you could forget that one,” she said. “That’s how Gibson made a name for himself, and the name, in many areas, was. . .”
“Asshole?”
“Pretty much. But I don’t know how many people wanted to kill him because of it.” Miriam thought thoroughly about that.
“Well, it only took one,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s what I mean,” said Miriam. “How do you pick just one from so many?”
Chapter
Ten
The next morning, after getting the kids out the door, I worked out at the local YM/YWHA. I’ve been trying to do that more often these days, but things like work, children and a generally lazy attitude tend to get in the way.
After the workout, I walked into the Kwik’N EZ store on Edison Avenue, headed for the back, and selected a bottle of spring water. I tried not to stand too close to the guy behind the counter, since I figured I wasn’t smelling my best at the moment.
Kwik ‘N EZ, despite its appalling spelling, is the kind of convenience store you’d expect in Midland Heights—that is, it features fresh, unusual produce, it has lactose-free everything, and is so organic you can practically smell the manure. Still, the guy behind the counter could easily tell you where the Spam was, or direct you to the Tastykake area. There is a limit to how upscale a convenience store can go.
The cashier was maybe 30, thin and bored, but without the tattoos and body piercings you might expect. He leaned over the counter, waiting. At this time of the morning, there weren’t many people in the store.
“Can I speak to the owner?” I asked.
Not a flicker. “You are,” he said.
“You’re the owner?”
He resisted the impulse to overstate the obvious and mock me. But he thought about it first. Being at least a decade younger than me and actually owning his own profit-making business gave him a certain advantage. “That’s right. Something I can do for you?”
I put the water bottle on the counter and reached into my denim jacket for my wallet. But before he had time to ask why I needed the owner to buy a bottle of water, I pointed to a box on the counter.
“How long have you been selling these?” I asked. The box, open to make its contents more accessible, bore a logo that read “STINK BOMBS! The Ultimate Smell Weapon!”
A Farewell to Legs Page 5