Muntbugger’s is a prime example of what is right and wrong with New Brunswick. In an attempt to please people blatant enough to embarrass a cocker spaniel, the restaurant tries to be all things to all patrons. It boasts a homey atmosphere in a building that could accommodate a small warehouse, has “antiques” hanging from its walls and ceiling, calls its hamburgers “Muntburgers,” which borders on the disgusting, and charges $4 for an imported beer like Molson, which is imported all the way from Canada. In a truck.
Naturally, such an establishment packs ‘em in, as Rutgers professors and J&J execs alike have decided they “discovered” the place, so normally, one has to wait a good 20 to 45 minutes to get a table at lunchtime. This was apparently not the case for Mrs. Louis Gibson. I actually found Steph at a table the minute I walked in.
She was resplendent in black, but her widow’s weeds were in this case a black Gap T-shirt and a pair of black jeans. No sense being uncomfortable just because somebody else was dead.
I sat down as she smiled at me, and apologized for being late, despite the fact that I was on time. Finding her waiting for me made it feel like I was late.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I just sat down when you walked in.” The fact that she already had a drink, and had consumed about half of it, gave away the lie, but I let it go.
I ordered a Diet Coke and we both ordered salads. I was pretending to be dieting, and she was just showing off. After the waiter left, I pulled my interview cassette recorder from my jacket and put it down on the table.
Steph looked a little surprised. “We’re taping?” she asked.
“I’m on assignment. You wouldn’t want me to misquote you.”
“Wouldn’t I? Anything you make up would probably sound better than the truth.”
I gave her my famous half-grin, guaranteed to be ingratiating. “I’m forty-three,” I told her. “You can’t expect my memory to be what it once was. Who are you, again?”
She smiled. “An old friend.”
“You don’t really mind the tape recorder, do you?”
She thought about it, but shook her head. “It’s okay,” she said.
I hit the record button. “You didn’t seem terribly upset when Louis was killed. Do you worry that makes you seem like a suspect?”
Stephanie’s eyes widened. “Whoa!” she said. “You don’t waste any time, do you?”
“Who’s got time to waste?” I said. I looked at her for a few moments, letting her know I was waiting for her to answer the question. She exhaled grandly.
“Okay,” she said. “I said you could have unlimited access. Well, you know Louis was not a model husband.”
“He had affairs.”
“He was rarely not having an affair,” she said, her voice empty of emotion. She didn’t seem upset, just reporting an unhappy fact. “Once he became well known in Washington, he could pretty much have his pick of the cute blondes, and there was a long succession of them.”
“Anyone who thinks you’re not enough is an idiot,” I blurted. Sometimes, even I don’t understand why I say some things.
She smiled. “You’re not seeing me clearly. You look at me through a haze of twenty-five years.”
“Not at all. I see you the way you are now. It was Legs who was trying to get back to being eighteen again.”
“You’re sweet,” she said. “But Louis needed younger women. He didn’t care who they were, or even if he liked them. He did-n’t care if he was embarrassing me by being seen with them. He didn’t care if his children knew about it, either. After a while, I stopped caring, too.”
“A lot of people would say that was reason enough to have him killed,” I suggested. Strangely, she smiled.
“You have to care to be that angry,” she said quietly. “You can’t have a crime of passion if you don’t have the passion.”
“So how did you react?” I asked.
Stephanie hesitated. In fact, she came to a complete halt, and if the lighting at Muntbugger’s hadn’t been fashionably dim, I’d have sworn she was blushing. The waiter bailed her out by bringing our lunch, and she waited until he left, then tried, unsuccessfully, to express her thoughts again. She started her answer more than once, and never uttered a complete word. I decided to bail her out.
“You had affairs of your own,” I said, and she looked down at her food, and nodded. “Why couldn’t you tell me that?”
“I didn’t want you to think badly of me.” I had to strain to hear her.
“I never thought my opinion meant so much to you,” I said.
“Well, it does.” She spoke quickly, to get past this sticky point. “Anyway, I decided to match Louis embarrassment for embarrassment, but I couldn’t do it. I had a couple of quick. . . episodes, and then I gave up. He didn’t care, and I learned not to care, too. Finally, our marriage found its level of dysfunction, and we made it work for us.”
“Functional dysfunction.”
“Yeah,” she chuckled. “Besides, if I was going to have Louis killed for having an affair, why wait for this particular one? He’d had more than I could count.”
“Who do you think did have a reason to kill Legs?”
“That’s what I’ve been agonizing over. Politically, there were lots of people who didn’t like Louis. God knows, even I didn’t agree with him politically much of the time. But to kill him? In Washington, if you don’t like somebody, you make their life miserable. Killing him would just end the fun.”
“How about personally? One of his ex-girlfriends?”
“Most of them were politically motivated—they wanted to move up, and sleeping with a connected guy helped them up the ladder. I can’t imagine any of them being in love with him, certainly not enough to kill the next in line.” “Nonetheless,” I said, “who was the one just before Ms. Cheri Braxton?” She winced at the name.
“Cheri?”
“I just report the facts—I don’t make ’em up.”
“Let’s see. The most recent one I knew about was named. . . oh, come on. . . Robyn. With a ‘y.’ Robyn Ezterhaus.” She spelled the last name, too.
“Did the affair with Robyn last an unusually long time? Was it especially intense?”
“They all tend to run together, but I don’t think so. And after all, Aaron. . .”
“What?”
Stephanie frowned. “It doesn’t make sense. If she wanted Louis so badly, she had to get rid of the competition. His being married was the problem. Why didn’t she come after me?”
I stared down and speared a piece of grilled chicken, which was the only thing making the salad even marginally interesting. “Why, indeed?” I said.
Chapter
Seventeen
Stephanie gave me a few names and phone numbers, including some of Legs’ political adversaries (of whom there was a large selection). Somewhere on the list was talk show host Estéban Suarez, with whom Legs had a very public argument not long before he died. Through Internet sources, I managed a few additional names. She promised to let me talk to her sons, and to Legs’ mother. When I asked about his brother, she said, “I don’t really know him very well. I can’t make any predictions.” Still, she promised to try.
When I got home from lunch, I changed back into my civilian clothes (which would have gotten me kicked out of even a classy McDonald’s) and checked on the answering machine, which was unblinking, and the computer, where there was a message for me on WUSS.
Peter Arnowitz, a novelist, occasional screenwriter (no credits on anything you’ve ever seen), and overall conspiracy theorist, had read my post about Legs. Pete is the kind of guy who has mysterious “sources” in every branch of the government, the movie business, law enforcement, and for all I know, the local 7-Eleven. He never divulges a source, and he’s never wrong. Ever.
Pete’s reply read: “I can’t confirm this, but I’m told through sources close to the investigation that the wife is the prime suspect. An arrest could happen within days. No physical evidence (that is, finge
rprints) that I know of, but Gibson messed around so much they figure his wife has to be mad at him. What’s puzzling is why they’re looking to act so quickly. They don’t have anything to go on, and a thin case could get tossed in minutes by the wrong judge. That’s it for now. I’ll let you know.”
That’s Peter. He never even asked why I needed to know about the investigation. He probably knew already. Arnowitz more than likely had sources inside Snapdragon, or a bug on my phone. If he did tap my phone, I hoped he didn’t listen to the tapes. Pete is way too valuable a source to bore him to death.
I sent him back a message, private like his to me, thanking him for his effort, and moved on. I called Sgt. Abrams in D.C.
He actually answered the phone despite knowing it was me on the line. “What do you need now, Tucker, a free pass to the White House tour?” It’s nice to know when people are happy to hear from you.
“I hear you guys expect to arrest Stephanie Gibson within the next few days,” I told him. “Can you confirm or deny?”
There was a long pause. When somebody thinks you’re a drooling idiot and you sucker punch him with competence, it creates a delicious moment. I savored this one.
“I have no comment.”
“That’s the best you can do? Despite being what you consider a bozo, I get this far this fast, and you can’t do any better than ‘no comment?’ Geez, Abrams, I thought more of you than that.”
Perhaps I laid it on a little thick, because Abrams did not take my comments in the jocular spirit with which they were intended. “Do you have anything else to ask, Tucker, or is this strictly a call to annoy me?”
“Let me ask you this: how can you possibly be thinking of charging Stephanie when all you have are hunches and circumstantial evidence?”
“No comment.”
“You’re no fun, Abrams.”
He hung up. I suppose I deserved that. I made a mental note to make it up to him the next time we spoke, assuming he’d take the call.
Meanwhile, there wasn’t much I could do today, so I got back to work on the third act of the mystery, and was in tantalizing proximity to the end when the door burst open and Ethan walked in, singing to himself.
“How’s it going, pal?” I said.
“Comme ci comme ça.” In sixth grade, you get French lessons.
“Bon,” I told him, and was about to attack the keyboard again when Leah came in, with a grump on her face, as had suddenly become usual.
Before I could ask her about it, I was saved by the phone. The voice on the other end was somewhat hushed, but I recognized it. I’d been talking to it three minutes earlier.
“This is Abrams.”
“Yeah, listen, Sergeant, I didn’t mean. . .”
He cut me off as my daughter hung up her book bag and slumped into the kitchen for a snack. “I’m on a cell phone outside the building. How did you know about the arrest?”
I stuttered for a second, trying to absorb what he said. “There really is going to be an arrest? You have enough to do that?”
“Soon. And I need to know your source.”
“I can’t do that, Abrams. You know I can’t.”
Abrams sighed. He did know I couldn’t. “This is from the top, Tucker. Nobody knows about it. I’m not even sure I know about it. How do you?”
“The fact of the matter is, Lieutenant, I’m not even sure where I got the information from. It was from a friend of a friend, if you know what I mean, and that’s all I’m going to say. But, how soon? And what do they have to use for. . .”
“Soon. And I can’t tell you anything about evidence. You know I can’t.” He was right about that, too.
“Thanks for the heads up,” I told him. We both hung up.
Stunned, I tried to call Stephanie, but got no answer at her hotel. At least she hadn’t checked out yet. I tried her cell phone, and got voice mail. I left a message telling her it was urgent she call me before she left town.
I’d like to say that Steph’s plight dominated my every thought for the rest of the evening, but the truth is that my mind is far too egocentric to allow such a thing. I concerned myself with making sure Leah fed the gecko (something that had immediately become a chore after the first time she’d done it). I chose not to watch, since leaving live worms on a little dish and then watching something that must, to them, look like Godzilla show up to devour them was a little more than my delicate sensibility could handle.
After that, we had the daily tantrum over homework, followed by the making-up and post-tantrum hugs, then preparing dinner, celebrating the arrival of Abby, eating dinner, packing Leah off to her soccer game, talking to the other parents at the cold, damp high school field during said game (nobody there knew anything about the stink bombs, either), then back home, baths, showers, pajamas, brushed teeth, arguments about why one has to go to bed at the same time as the other despite the age difference, then a cuddle on the couch with my wife before she headed off to bed.
Through it all, my mind was occupied with something else. I had to get to “THE END” of that damn screenplay, so I sat down to complete my task at 11:30 p.m.
By 1:30 a.m it was pretty much done, and purged from my conscious mind. I’d pay for it in the morning, but I already felt better. The mystery had been solved, the wicked punished, the good rewarded, and most importantly, the words “FADE OUT” typed. I’d print out a copy in the morning and force Abby to read it the next night.
The computer went off about a quarter to two, and I headed for the stairs, with the lights out everywhere on the ground floor. Luckily, I know where everything is in my house, so I only stubbed my toe twice and tripped once.
But the moment my foot hit the first stair, I heard a jarring crash of glass and the sound of a car peeling away. Quick as a cat, I stood transfixed on the first stair, and gaped into my living room wondering what to do.
Amid the broken glass, a splinter of wood from the frame of what used to be our bow window and the usual clutter of remote controls, discarded socks, and forgotten toys, was a rock about the size of a softball, covered in a man’s handkerchief.
I shook off my initial stupor and walked to the rock, careful to avoid the shards of glass. Passing the side table, I picked up a pair of gloves I’d left there the previous March after the final snowfall of the season. No sense rushing these things—we might have gotten one of those freak blizzards in July you’re always hearing about.
I pulled on the gloves and bent down to pick up the rock. It was fairly heavy, and the handkerchief, it was now obvious, had been lashed to it with thick rubber bands. I eyeballed its trajectory from the street, and marveled at the thrower’s arm. The Yankees could use a guy like that for middle relief.
Written in permanent marker on the handkerchief were the words, “YOU WERE WARNED.”
Chapter
Eighteen
You don’t often get a rock with a threatening message thrown through your front window at two in the morning, so I savored the moment. In other words, I stood there a long time with a knot in my stomach and a definite shimmy in my knees.
The knot in my stomach leapt to my throat when the light in the room suddenly came on. I spun, sending broken glass sliding to various corners of the room.
“Jesus!” said Abby, standing on the stairs and looking down at me. “What happened?”
To my eternal shame, I considered lying to her. Abby was already on edge about the phone call, and this would be about sixteen times worse than that. So what could I say—that I’d been walking across the room on my way to the stairs when the window inexplicably exploded?
I held out the rock, like a little boy explaining to his mother how he hadn’t meant to break his fire engine, but displaying two, neatly snapped-apart pieces.
“Somebody threw this through our window.”
“Holy shit,” she said daintily. Abigail walked down the stairs and surveyed the wreckage that is our living room, layered with the wreckage that now was our front window. “Are you
okay?”
“Yeah, I was on the stairs when it happened.” She put on a pair of slippers that were on the stairs, came over and gave me a hug anyway, which I would have appreciated more thoroughly under different circumstances.
“Why would somebody throw a rock through our window?” she asked. Abby hadn’t seen the words on the handkerchief, and I wasn’t rushing to show them to her.
“I didn’t have time to ask.”
Her eyes narrowed. She knows when I’m being evasive. Apparently the only emotion she can’t detect on my face immediately is lust, or all our conversations would begin with “okay,” or “not now, for goodness sake!” “What aren’t you telling me?” she asked.
My lips pursed with a “you just don’t trust me” look, but she wasn’t buying it. I showed her the note on the handkerchief.
Abby sat down on the bottom stair. She started to rub her temples with both index fingers. “It’s starting again, Aaron,” she said.
“Put your head between your legs.”
I got a sharp look for my trouble. “You know what I mean. The threats. The worrying. The constant feeling that we’ll be under attack at any moment. We swore we weren’t going to have this again, didn’t we?”
“I don’t know why we’re having it now. It doesn’t make sense.”
“Do rocks through a window usually make sense?”
I started picking up the larger pieces of glass and stacking them gingerly on the coffee table. “You like to think a message is being sent,” I said. “But there’s no message here.”
“I think the message is pretty clear. They don’t want you looking into Louis Gibson’s murder.”
“Who doesn’t? Every reporter in a three hundred mile radius is looking into the murder. I don’t have anything the others want. I’m not so close to the solution that whoever’s responsible has to be worried. Driving from house to house and throwing a rock through every reporter’s window would take months. I just don’t understand why they’re after me, and not anybody else.”
A Farewell to Legs Page 8