“Yeah, but that’s the point,” I countered. “He didn’t stick around to watch them run. He threw it and ran. Maybe he was trying to make a point about the school. And because this is your part of the school, maybe about you. What do you think, Hester?”
She thought about it. “There are tons of troublemakers in those classes,” she said thoughtfully. “I can’t single one out just because he pisses me off. And there wasn’t anybody who specifically had a gripe on those days. Nope, this was the nasal equivalent of joyriding, Mr. Tucker.” And before I could go on, she was off to dock one team of girls a point for spiking the volleyball, something I was impressed they could even do.
You’d have thought the whole stink bomb thing would have died down by now, anyway, but I’d seen an article in the Central Jersey Press Tribune detailing a meeting of the Buzbee PTO in which it was actually suggested that the girls’ locker room be padlocked while the girls were inside to prevent further incidents. It wasn’t until someone in the crowded meeting yelled the word “fire” that the padlock suggestion was tabled indefinitely.
I went home and caught the spectacle of Preston Burke carefully painting my bow window, which was quite a sight. With a very thin brush and a straight edge, he was avoiding any splash of paint on the window glass itself. I felt I was intruding on a private moment.
Inside, the answering machine was flashing, and there was a message from Stephanie. “I’m sorry about the scene with the boys and Lester,” she said. “If you want to re-interview them, I’ll set something up on the phone.”
I didn’t think Stephanie’s sons knew much of anything about the murder, although there were clearly undercurrents to this family that Carl Jung would find scary. And there was, now, a pretty tight deadline, and no reason to waste time. So I called her back and said I didn’t see a need for a new interview, that the waters had been muddied enough by the first one, and let it be known that if I never actually came into contact with Lester again, I wouldn’t weep into my pillow at night.
“He can be a trial,” she admitted. “I can’t wait until all this is over, and I can go back to having a life again.”
“I’ve never been involved in the death of a public figure before,” I told her. “How long do you think it’ll take before you can put this behind you?”
“It would be a big step if they found out who did it, so I did-n’t have to worry about being arrested every waking minute,” said Steph. It must be an awful bother to have to plan your day around being arraigned and making bail, and never knowing when such activities might be coming up.
“Who do you suspect?” I’d never actually asked.
“Tell you the truth,” Stephanie said, “I think the woman he was sleeping with did it herself. And knowing Louis in situations like that, I’m not entirely sure I blame her.”
I didn’t bother to tell her that the police had almost definitively eliminated Cherie Braxton as a suspect, for one thing because she lacked the upper body strength to get a kitchen knife through Legs’ rib cage and into his heart. Besides, she didn’t like Legs enough to kill him, from what I could tell.
“Well, I’m supposed to write about it by Monday,” I said, “and I haven’t a clue what I’m going to say.”
“Well, if you need any help, you know who to call,” she said, and we hung up.
By the time the kids got home, I’d exhausted all my best ways to procrastinate, Burke had quit for the day, and my children were mystified at my insistence on helping them with their homework, despite their not needing any help. Leah went so far as to retreat to her room, turn on the CD player, and close the door, all to keep out the guy who still does long division the old way. It’s hell being middle-aged.
Abby got home a little early, and I went upstairs to get dressed for the conference with my brain trust. She walked into the bedroom and started changing from her work clothes.
“Did Burke finish the window?” she asked. I told her about the fine job he’d done, and how we had devoted an extra couple hundred to the beautification of our front window. She nodded. “He’s still pretty creepy, though, isn’t he?”
“I don’t know. I’m starting to like him.”
“He’s not in love with you,” she pointed out.
“Well, it’s no wonder he’s crazy about you,” I said, embracing her. “You drive me wild, walking around in various states of undress.”
“Luckily, I don’t do that very often at the office,” she said. “Besides, I could probably drive you wild if I dressed like the Michelin Man.”
I considered that. “Wait. I’m picturing that. Wow. Yes, you could.”
She broke the clinch and put on a sweatshirt and sweatpants. “I’m just still a little concerned about Burke,” she said. Abby waited, but got no response. “Aaron, are you listening?”
“No, I’m picturing you dressed in tires.”
“It’s driving you wild, isn’t it?”
“Just as you knew it would, you tease,” I said.
“You’re a very scary person, Aaron,” she said. “Now, get dressed and go talk to the boys from Bloomfield.”
Spoil-sport.
Chapter
Seventeen
“Okay, so Stephanie Jacobs is smashing her boobs into you, and you’re telling her to cut it out?” Mark Friedman was shaking his head, incredulous. “What’s wrong with you, Tucker?”
“I’m terminally married,” I said.
We were sitting around a large table, the five of us. Muntbugger’s had been warned ahead of time, but took no reservations. So I’d had to wait for about fifteen minutes while the troops gathered (I’d gotten there first, feeling some responsibility for the occasion). Now, all of us having ordered and already downing a beer, I was getting the others up to speed on the state of the Legs Gibson investigation. Apparently, my conduct during a crucial episode was somewhat disappointing to my friends, or at least Friedman.
“I’m married, too, but I’m not that married,” Friedman said.
“You were at Aaron’s wedding,” Mahoney said. “Don’t you remember Abby?”
“I was pretty drunk,” Friedman noted.
I took a picture of Abigail out of my wallet and showed it to him. Friedman’s voice dropped to a rasp. “Okay,” he said, “I see your point. Can I keep this?”
“No.” I snatched it out of his hand and put it back into my wallet. I’d have to clean it off later.
“It’s not that I don’t want to see pictures of your wife,” Greg Wharton said, “but I don’t think that’s why you asked us to come here, is it, Tucker?”
“No, thanks, Wharton. I have one question to ask each of you, and I’d appreciate it if you’d each think very carefully about it before you answer. There may be follow-up.”
I took the tape recorder out and put it in the center of the table. And the four of them burst into such a storm of laughter that people at tables in all directions around us looked over, shook their heads, and despaired at the state of middle-aged men in America.
“What the hell is that thing for?” Mahoney gasped through guffaws. “We going to sing later?”
I was prepared for the outburst. “I’m working,” I said. “If I’m going to quote you idiots, I need to get it right, and I don’t plan on taking notes all through dinner.”
“Is Snapdragon paying for dinner?” McGregor wanted to know. “I didn’t order the filet mignon sandwich, but if they’re buying, I could always change.”
“Maybe they are,” I said. “If what you guys tell me is any help at all, I’ll put it on my expense sheet.” There was much hand-rubbing, smiling, and eye-widening at that remark. Friedman ordered himself an Anchor Steam. McGregor didn’t change to the steak sandwich, but he did add steak fries to his order. They make them waffle style at Muntbugger’s.
It was McGregor who finally sat back and put his hands behind his head in a gesture of relaxation and preparedness. “What are your questions?” he asked. Thank god for McGregor. Otherwise, we’d have
sat there all night trying to make each other laugh, and succeeding most of the time. High school friends are easy.
“I’m going to start with Wharton,” I said. “He gets two questions, one for being a politician, and another for being a doctor.”
“Osteopath,” he corrected.
“What is an osteopath, anyway, Greg?” McGregor asked. “Sounds like somebody who attacks you with the bones of his last victim.”
“That’s very amusing,” Wharton said sourly. “We’re the most misunderstood branch of the medical profession. Why, if internists had to know half of what. . .”
“Save the electioneering for the politician question,” Friedman said.
I saw my opening and dove in. “Let’s say somebody in Washington wanted Legs Gibson dead,” I started. “What kind of idiot would they have to be to do something about it?”
“A big idiot,” Wharton said immediately. “You don’t kill the people you disagree with. You make their lives miserable and then make sure you smear them so much they can’t get re-elected and have to go work for a living. Killing them is just way too quick. There’s not enough suffering. Besides, there’s the whole ‘getting caught’ thing that can put a crimp in your campaign.”
The waiter brought our dinner, so I turned off the recorder until everyone was well hunkered down. When I turned it back on, numerous groan-worthy puns later, I was asking Friedman about carpets.
“Let’s say we’re in a room with a light beige carpet,” I started.
He cut me off. “What kind of carpet?” He asked.
“Light beige,” I repeated.
“Deep pile, shag, shallow pile, wall-to-wall, area rug, old, new, Scotchguard, no Scotchguard, what?” Friedman’s tone indicated that he was talking to a complete moron, and was exasperated for having had to explain himself further. “Polyester blend, wool, what kind of material?”
“I’d say deep pile, wall-to-wall,” I started. “It’s a rental apartment, so my guess would be that every unit has the same rug.”
“Carpet,” he corrected. “A rug is something that doesn’t go wall-to-wall.”
“Or something that Wharton could use on that bald spot,” McGregor noted, to some hoots.
“Better than that comb-over Legs was doing, from what I could see on the news,” Mahoney chimed in.
“Let’s not stray too far from the topic at hand,” I urged.
“Topic at head,” McGregor interjected. I ignored him, and pressed on.
“The carpet, Friedman, the carpet.”
“What about it?”
“Okay, so it’s beige, right? And whatever pile I said it was, and a rental apartment carpet, so it’s probably not the most expensive one left in the warehouse.”
“Okay,” Friedman said. “So?”
“So let’s say, for the sake of argument, that there’s one area on the ru. . . carpet that’s a little bit darker than the rest of it. What does that tell me?”
Friedman looked at me with disdain. “You don’t have to be a carpet expert to figure that out,” he said. “Something’s been spilled on the rug.”
“Carpet,” Wharton corrected.
“I’m willing to bet that area was a little stiffer than the rest, no matter how many times it had been vacuumed, right?” Friedman asked.
“That’s right,” I said, prompting him to pontificate on the art of rugging a little more. Reporting isn’t about talking. It’s about getting others to talk. It’s something the TV people have never figured out.
“And it stood up a little bit more, didn’t it?” he said, essentially repeating himself, but I let him go on, to see if he’d reach the conclusion I wanted. I nodded. “So then, something was spilled on it, but there was no stain, right? I mean, no discoloration.”
“No, that’s right. It was a little darker, but not a different color than the rest.”
Friedman smiled a smug smile. The wise old expert on Aladdin’s mode of transport would now dispense his hard-earned expertise, if we were men with sufficient sense to stop chewing long enough to hear it.
“So what happened was, something was spilled on the carpet,” Friedman began.
“And we don’t have to be Einstein to figure out what that was,” Wharton said. I gave him the patented stare I give my kids to shut them up, but on Wharton, in this case, it had the opposite effect than the one my children employ: Wharton actually shut up.
“And whatever it was, it was mopped up just about immediately,” Friedman went on, ignoring both Wharton and the byplay that had gone on between Wharton and me. “Because you’re right, Tucker, if it’s in a rental, it was probably a cheap carpet, so if it had been left to stain for even a couple of minutes, it probably would have left a noticeable discoloration.”
“What do you use to mop up liquid on a rug?” I asked, not being well schooled in the art of cleaning. And if you don’t believe me, come to my house sometime.
“Best thing right away is club soda,” he said. “So it doesn’t leave a stain, but the fabric is left with a change in texture, and that’s why you can notice it, if you look, and feel it, if you touch it or walk on it.”
“Whart,” I said, “if someone is stabbed in the heart, I assume that would cause a pretty massive blood loss. Would I be wrong?”
“Well, there’d be a lot of immediate spurting,” he said. “You have to figure that a wound to the heart, if the heart were contracted, or beating, at the time, would last for a few beats of the heart, expansions and contractions, at the very least. So blood would be spraying all over for at least a few seconds.” “The police report indicated that there was a good deal of blood on the bed,” I said. “Would that be consistent with the kind of wound you’re talking about?”
Wharton thought for a moment, chewing carefully on his cheddar burger. Finally, he regarded me and pointed a finger. “Can I have one of your fries?” he said.
I handed him one, probably without even thinking. “What about the blood, Whart?”
“You told us to consider our answers carefully, didn’t you?” he asked through a mouthful of potato. “I’m considering.”
“Not to mention raising your intake of carbohydrates by about six zillion percent,” Friedman added.
“From what you’ve told me, the wound was a single wound, delivered through the rib cage and into the heart,” Wharton said finally. “That’s a strong person pushing that knife, or a really, really angry one pumped up by adrenaline.”
“So there’d be a bunch of blood?” I asked, trying to get him back to the question.
“Not as much as in the first few seconds of a head wound,” Wharton said. “But for maybe ten or fifteen seconds, the blood would be flying, and not in any predictable pattern. It wouldn’t be pretty in the room, I’ll tell you that.”
“If he’s stabbed while he’s lying on the bed, would it fly far enough that there’d be a stain almost at the foot of the bed, and to the side, like where you’d put your shoes, if you were neat?”
Wharton thought about that for a while, too, until I realized he wanted another French fry. Given that, he said, “No, I’d say probably not. The heart would pump out blood, but not in arcs. It would fly up, miss the bed, and then hit just the one spot at the foot of the bed. There would have to be a lot of other dark spots on the rug to indicate that was what happened.”
“So if there is just the one spot, and a relatively large one, at the base of the bed, what does that tell us?” I asked.
“One of two things,” Wharton said, washing down his pilfered potato with some of McGregor’s beer. “Either he was killed near the foot of the bed and fell down. . .” he tailed off.
“Or what?”
“Or that wasn’t blood that got washed up at the foot of the bed. Could be other bodily fluids.”
Emitted was a loud group grimace that you can actually hear on the cassette tape, and Mahoney made a comment about not discussing such things in front of open food. I turned to McGregor.
“Okay, Ala
n, let’s talk money.” McGregor brightened considerably, about to show us his level of expertise. Everyone was glad not to be discussing bodily fluids.
“What money?”
“About thirteen million dollars that’s missing from the Legs Gibson ‘You’d-Better-Have-My-Values’ Foundation. If I want to see where that money came from, and even more fun, where it went, what do I have to do?”
McGregor grabbed his beer back from Wharton, who looked annoyed, and took a long drag on the bottle. Then he put it back down on the table, out of Wharton’s reach.
“Ask,” he said.
“Ask? Ask whom?” I was showing off my grammatical expertise here. I was an English major in college, you know.
“Ask the Foundation. Believe it or not, Gibson’s American Values thing is a not-for-profit organization. That means the books are a matter of public record, and anybody can ask for an accounting whenever they feel like it. You gotta love America.” McGregor grinned at that.
“So if I just call up and say hi, I’m a member of the public, and I’d like to see your books for the past three years, they have to give them to me?” Wheels were spinning in my head that I had-n’t used since freshman economics, a class I almost never attended.
“That’s right. Of course, if there was illegal activity, I’d be surprised to see it labeled that way. Somebody had to find a way to skim off the money without being obvious about it.” McGregor’s eyes got dreamy, like he was trying to come up with the right way to do such a thing. If this went on too long, he’d be trying to get Max Bialystock to invest in a musical about Hitler by the time dessert came.
“If you saw the books, would you be able to figure it out?”
He came back to earth. “I don’t know,” McGregor said. “It depends on how clever the person doing the skimming was.”
“Let’s say the person was Legs Gibson.”
“Twelve seconds,” McGregor said without boasting. “Less, if Legs was distracted.”
Mahoney had been sitting, semi-quietly, at the other end of the table all night, but all the activity had gotten to him. “Why am I here, again?” he asked. “Was it just to make sure that Friedman doesn’t break the bank ordering exotic beers he couldn’t recognize without the labels?”
A Farewell to Legs Page 18