A Farewell to Legs

by JEFFREY COHEN

  Preston Burke was finishing work on the door when he saw us approach. “Watch his tail by the wet paint,” Burke said. “I did-n’t know you had a dog.”

  “I didn’t,” I told him. “Now, I do. It’s been that kind of morning.”

  Burke knelt down and started to stroke Warren. “Nice dog,” he said. “He doesn’t mind strangers, does he?” Then he looked into the dog’s eyes. “No you don’t, do you? Do you?” he said. People ask dogs questions like that all the time, as if they’re expecting an answer. “No, I don’t mind strangers,” the dog would say. “I just like it when they give me some bacon.”

  Warren relieved some pressure on his bladder out in the front yard, which was my plan. So I closed the screen door, preventing him from running out, and put down his food and water bowls, filled both, then showed him where they were. He seemed unconcerned, and went to explore the house. Finally, he settled on the rug in my office, four feet from where I was working, and went to sleep.

  I was about to call Abby when the phone rang. It was Margot the Agent, informing me that four production companies out of the seventy-five or so that I’d faxed had requested a copy of the script. It was better than nothing, but not much. In the middle of the conversation, the call waiting beep sounded, and I blew off Margot for, as it turned out, McGregor, who sounded excited.

  “I’ve been looking over the books for People for American Values,” he said. “I found the thirteen million.”

  It took me a few seconds to absorb that. “That fast?” I gasped.

  “I told you it wouldn’t take long, especially if it was Legs who hid the money.”

  “Was it Legs?”

  “No,” McGregor said. “It was done much too cleverly for it to be him. Maybe someone who worked for him, because it certainly looks like it was done at his bidding.”

  “Why?”

  “The money came out of separate, private accounts Legs and his vice presidents had established to use for fund-raising, entertaining pols and donors, paying for travel, that sort of thing,” McGregor explained. “This has been going on for years, which is why nobody noticed. They never took more than five or six thousand at a time, but eventually, it added up.”

  “I’ll say. To me, the five or six thousand sounds good.” Doing mental arithmetic (which was never my best subject, it should be noted), I estimated that it would take. . . uh. . .

  “How many of these five thousand dollar skims would it take to amass thirteen million, Alan?” I asked him.

  “Two thousand, six hundred,” he said.

  “So if they did it every week for fifty years, they’d have enough?”

  “Well, that’s the thing,” McGregor said. “It was five thousand, but five thousand from each of ten accounts at a time. So it would only take five years if they did it every week, which they didn’t. They took more like ten years, and did different accounts at different times. No pattern, no huge withdrawals, no noticeable crime, for a long time. If Legs hadn’t gotten killed, it’s possible this could have gone on longer, and made whoever did it even more money.”

  “Wow. So maybe whoever killed Legs is pissed off now, because the attention from the murder cut off the gravy train.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe whoever killed Legs decided to do it because they had enough money to do whatever they wanted now, and they didn’t need him anymore.” McGregor has a devious side you rarely get to see in certified public accountants outside an IRS audit.

  “You care to take a guess at who was skimming, Alan?” I asked. “Any style to the crime that could point to one person or another?”

  “That’s the beauty of it,” he said. “It could be any one of those ten vice presidents, or it could be Legs.”

  “I think we can disqualify Legs as a suspect,” I said.

  “Yeah,” McGregor chuckled, “that’s just what they want you to think.” I thanked him and hung up.

  I was starting to formulate a theory, and the best way to confirm it was to call Lucille Watkins. She answered on the third ring, and appeared to be sober. She even remembered who I was.

  “I don’t know there’s anything more I can tell you, Mr. Tucker,” Lucille said. “My brother’s been dead seven years, and he couldn’t possibly have been in Washington last month. That’s all there is to it.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “but I’m wondering about something. You said there was a time when things got so bad that Branford sold his blood to make some money.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “Drank it all up, fifteen minutes after he got the money.”

  “Did he ever sell anything else?” I wasn’t sure exactly how to broach the subject.

  “Anything else?” Lucille asked. “Like what, a kidney or something?” She laughed rudely, having been surprised by the question, and by her response to it.

  “I was thinking more of his hair.” She stopped laughing, and came back after a few seconds, sounding mystified. “You know, Mr. Tucker, I’d forgotten about it, but there was this one time he had a bunch of hair cut off—you know, Bran wore a long pony tail for a while—and sold it to one of those ‘real human hair’ wig places. He got a good price for the hair, too. How did you figure that out?”

  “The hair was where the DNA came from,” I told her. “Whoever was in the room was wearing the wig that the company made from your brother’s hair.”

  “Eight years later?” she asked in wonder.

  “Some people wear those things for thirty years,” I said. “Do you think Tony Bennett’s fooling anybody?”

  She was aghast. “Tony Bennett?” she asked.

  Lucille gave me the name of the company in Odessa, TX that bought Branford Purell’s hair. It had gone out of business, but the records it left were still available to local authorities, so I’d call Abrams later and fill him in, but I was willing to bet I knew what they would say.

  One person who wore a toupee was involved in this affair. One person who had sabotaged every attempt I’d made to find out more in his presence. One person who might have had Legs’ confidence, and could easily have been helping him skim money away from his own foundation.

  Branford Purell’s hair had ridden in on Lester Gibson’s head.

  Chapter

  Twenty

  Preston Burke finished painting the front door just before the kids got home that afternoon. He had done a much better job than I would have, sanding and smoothing the entire surface before he applied primer and then two coats of paint. I was impressed, and ashamed.

  All that took a back seat to the touching scene when Ethan walked in the door, hung up his backpack, and walked directly through the living room and past the hyperventilating dog without noticing anything out of the ordinary. Warren looked mightily disappointed, but I explained to him about Asperger’s Syndrome, and he nodded his understanding. Ethan went right into the bathroom and turned on the exhaust fan. It was anybody’s guess how long he would be in there.

  Things were different when Leah walked in. The dog practically rushed the door this time, and Leah fell to her knees, yelled “He’s here!” and gave the dog the biggest hug since Charlie Brown met Snoopy. “Daddy, he’s here!” she repeated, sincere in her belief that the dog had merely gotten our address from the shelter people, hopped into his car, and driven all the way to our house on his own, without my knowledge.

  “I know, Puss,” I said. “But you know he’s going to be a big responsibility, right? You’re going to have to walk him every day after school.”

  “Every day, Daddy,” she said.

  “Like today, right?”

  “Today? I have six pages of homework!” Leah fretted prettily, but to no effect on her hardhearted father.

  “Today. Here’s the leash and here’s a bag.” I handed her a plastic bag from the supermarket.

  “What’s the bag for?”

  “What do you think?”

  She thought about it. “Ewwww. . .” she said.

  “You got it.”

  “You mean I
have to. . .”

  “You sure do,” I said. “There are laws in this town, and this is the kind of town where they’re serious about those laws.”

  She grumbled, but took the leash, and led the dog outside. We settled on a specific route—one that would require crossing no large streets, and a brief visit to the park. That, I figured should give Warren the time and varied scenery he would need.

  While she was out, Ethan came out of the bathroom and started on his homework. I was about to impart the news of the dog, but the phone rang, and I went to answer it.

  “Mr. Tucker?” The voice was shaky, and vaguely familiar. I braced myself for the latest threat. “This is Jason Gibson.”

  Whoa. If you’d told me Marcel Proust was going to call out of the blue, I might have found it just a tad less likely than a call from Legs Gibson’s younger son. But this was a lucky break, since Marcel probably didn’t speak English all that well, even when he was alive.

  “Hi, Jason. I’m surprised to hear from you, but I’m glad you called.” I was trying as hard as I could to sound somewhat jovial. “What’s up?” If I got any more jovial, they’d probably have me committed.

  “I just wanted you to know,” Jason began. His voice was urgent, and somewhat hushed. I couldn’t tell if he was on a land line or a wireless phone. “About what my brother and I were telling you the other day. It wasn’t the truth.” “Jason, where are you? Are there people listening to this conversation?” I got up to pace.

  “No, I’m back at school. They don’t know I’m calling you. But I just wanted you to know.”

  “What wasn’t the truth, Jason? You guys didn’t tell me much that could be lies. You didn’t tell me much at all.”

  He paused, thinking about how to say this without getting himself in trouble, or saying anything that could be traced directly back to him later. “Well, I was there the week before the stabbing, but. . .”

  I was going to wear out a path in the rug. “But what?”

  “Don’t believe anything they tell you, Mr. Tucker. Every word of it is a lie, okay? I don’t want to leave the country, so I’m telling you now. You can’t trust anything they tell you.”

  “Who, Jason? Your mother? Your Uncle Lester?”

  Jason chuckled a chuckle with no humor in it. “My uncle’s never going to tell you anything, Mr. Tucker, so you don’t have to worry about him lying to you. But everyone else is a total liar, okay?” He hung up.

  The front door opened and Leah walked in with Warren on the leash. He was panting happily, and she still had the plastic bag, which was empty.

  Warren looked at me as Leah took his leash off. He seemed to grin, but that was just the panting from his exciting walk. Then he walked onto the rug in my office and relieved himself right next to my chair.

  Ethan walked in from the kitchen and took a look. “Dad!” he said. “Did you know we have a dog?”

  Chapter

  Twenty-One

  In the abstract, it’s easy to kill a dog. You just think of it as something that has invaded your house and intends to make your rug smell bad. In the concrete, material world, you have to look into those big brown eyes and watch those floppy ears, and the fact is, you just can’t do it. And bringing back a dog to the shelter is a lot like bringing back a used car. Once you’re out the door, “The merchandise is your responsibility. But we’d be happy to sell you some floor mats and a pine tree deodorant you can hang from your rear view mirror.”

  Ethan and Leah were introduced, that day, to the wonderful world of rug cleaner and paper towels, and the fun-filled uses to which they can be put. They complained, but the dog was still new to their lives, and they did what was asked of them. I knew this trend would not last long, but I was powerless to stop it.

  I called Mason Abrams that afternoon to tell him about Bran-ford Purell’s hair, but he wasn’t in, and I was condemned to voice mail. I would have told Fax McCloskey, but I was relatively sure he didn’t exist, and was just an illusion run by a man behind a curtain employed by the Washington D.C. Police Department. If I ever did get in to see him, I’d ask him for a brain, or a heart. Or some height.

  After that, I tried getting through to Stephanie. Naturally, I wasn’t going to blow Jason’s cover for him, but I did want to see if she had any suspicions about Lester, and that would require my talking to her when she was alone. She wasn’t in, and that settled that, for the time being.

  When Abby got home, she too fell under Warren’s spell. Of course, she didn’t have that far to fall, since she had pushed me toward the shelter to begin with. If it had been that easy to get her to fall in love with me, we’d have married a year earlier. Women are funny that way.

  We had dinner, which Warren watched with great interest, and the kids did their best to interest him in his dog toy, which was a rubber ball in the shape of a shoe. Never give a dog a toy shoe to chew up, because that encourages them to go after the real thing.

  After dinner, the three of them went to play with the dog, and I cleaned up the dishes. I was distancing myself emotionally from Warren, since I didn’t want to feel bad when the urge to kick him out the door overcame me, and besides, I hate to admit that I’ve been wrong. After all the public bitching and moaning I’d done about not having a dog, actually enjoying the dog would have made me look silly. Okay, sillier.

  I did preside over a family meeting, at which the issue of a name for the dog came up, and the overwhelming winner in the election was: Warren. Go figure.

  It was just after seven, and at that moment it hit me: in less than two hours, Anne Mignano would be facing the wolves at the Board of Education meeting, and I had done nothing to help. I hadn’t even failed, because in order to fail, you have to put out some sort of effort. All I’d done was question a gadfly on exercise equipment, a janitor, and a gym teacher, none of whom could actually be considered a source of information, since none of them had any.

  I sat down at the kitchen table and slammed my fist down like Bogart in Casablanca, except I wasn’t mad at Ingrid Bergman. Why hadn’t I just gotten up the courage to go talk to those parents? Was there still time to call them on the phone and tell them to go ask their kids if they were delinquents? This was probably going to lead to Anne losing her job after her contract was up, and after all my talk about what a good friend I am and how I appreciate all she’s done for Ethan, I had done nothing.

  I was a bad friend. I was a bad person. I didn’t deserve to own such a fine dog.

  The dog chased his ball into the kitchen, picked it up and ran out again, to much laughter. Leah, who had been chasing him, stopped giggling when she saw the look on my face. She suddenly reverted to the adorable six-year-old she used to be, and sat on my lap. I held her close, trying to forget that I was the scum of the universe.

  “What’s the matter, Daddy?” she asked, stroking my cheek.

  “I’m just a little upset, Puss,” I told her. “I promised someone I would find something out for them, and then I couldn’t, and I’m upset that I let them down.”

  “Oh,” said my daughter. “That’s too bad.”

  Yeah. That’s too bad. And wait until your next principal is some discipline-obsessed Nazi who’ll probably give your children detention for being cute. Luckily, I wasn’t blowing this out of proportion.

  “I know,” I told Leah. “I’m sorry I’m not being happy about Warren. I’m just upset with myself, not anybody else.”

  She gave me a Leah hug, which is rumored to be able to cause a smile on clinically depressed people for whom Prozac is a breath mint. I smiled weakly and hugged her back. Leah got up off my lap and headed out of the kitchen. No sense sitting here with a big old drag like this guy when there was a fun dog to play with.

  At the edge of the dining room, she stopped and looked at me. “What were you supposed to find out, Daddy?” she asked.

  I sighed. There was no point in trying to evade the question. “I was supposed to find out who threw the stink bombs in your school,” I told my
daughter.

  She got a strange look on her face, one that indicated that I must be on an intellectual level just a hair below Warren’s. “Susan Mystroft threw the stink bombs,” she said in a voice dripping with superiority. “Everybody knows that, Dad.” And she turned and walked out of the room, as I heard Abby yell, “no, no, Warren, not there!”

  Chapter

  Twenty-Two

  I blinked a couple of times, then stood up. “Ethan!” I yelled. “Get in here!”

  “What’d I do?”

  “Nothing! Get in here now!” He showed up in a few seconds, over Abby’s pleas for paper towels and rug cleaner. Ethan looked worried, like I was going to kill him whether he’d done something wrong or not.

  “Ethan! Who threw the stink bomb in the girls’ locker room?”

  He narrowed his eyes. “Susan Mystroft. Why, did somebody say that I. . .”

  “No!” I handed him the rug cleaner and paper towels. “Give these to your mother.”

  He did that while I raced to the wall phone. I pushed the speed dial button marked “Melissa,” and waited until Miriam answered the phone.

  “Hi, Aaron,” she said breezily. “What’s new?”

  “No time,” I told her. “Put Melissa on the phone.”

  “Melissa?”

  “Your daughter,” I reminded her.

  “I know who Melissa is,” Miriam said brusquely. “Why do you need to talk to her?”

  “Miriam, I’ve got no time. Please. Melissa, now!”

  In seconds, Melissa’s usually confident voice came on the line, sounding like a tiny bear cub looking for its mother. “Um, hi, Aaron,” she said. “Is Leah there?”

  “Melissa, who threw the stink bomb into the girls’ locker room?”

  “Not me,” she said. “I wasn’t even there that day.”