A Farewell to Legs

by JEFFREY COHEN

“There’s more,” I told her finally. “I have evidence that Louis might have been killed standing up, and then laid out on the bed to make it look like he’d been there all along. Can you think of a reason someone would do that?”

  Again, “no,” this time sounding smaller and more meek.

  “We need to meet, Steph. Are you coming up to Jersey for the weekend?”

  I got the impression she had her hand over the mouthpiece, but Stephanie came back very quickly. “I hadn’t been planning on it,” she said, “but it sounds like it’s important we see each other.”

  “I have to finish the story by Monday for Snapdragon to print it on time,” I said. “That’s why there’s some urgency in the timing.”

  “Okay,” Steph said, starting to sound more normal. “I’ll come up. Do you know the Hyatt Hotel in New Brunswick?”

  “Sure. I can practically see it from my bedroom window.”

  “I’ll be there tomorrow. I’ll call when I have a room number. We can meet there.”

  Stephanie Jacobs in a hotel room—there was a time when that would have answered every prayer I’d ever care to offer up, if I was the prayer-offering-up type. Now, it was not quite as exciting as I would have hoped. It was, in fact, just a little bit scary. After all, the woman had come within inches of being arrested for killing her husband, and for all I knew, she had killed him.

  But I didn’t think so.

  Chapter

  Twenty-Four

  The dog continued his assault on the rug in my office, completely ignoring every other carpeted area in the house. I began to think he had a particular grudge against me, since I was the only one who hadn’t taken him for a walk yet. Warren loved a walk more than most other males like staying at home and watching the game on a plasma TV with the remote in their hands and a beer close by on the table. It’s the advantage of being a dog, I guess, that one’s pleasures are so simple.

  Leah, at least, had fallen so completely in love with Warren that she was pleased to take him out when she arrived home from school on Friday. She said “hi” to Preston on the way in, having totally accepted him as a fixture in the house, and he tipped his painter’s cap at her and smiled as she walked by with Warren, making sure the dog’s tail didn’t brush against the black paint on the railing. Burke was nothing if not thorough.

  Friday night my mother came to have dinner with her grandchildren, and in the process, to see Abby and me. She laughed at virtually everything the kids did, whether it was funny or not, chuckled when they were being especially obnoxious, and told the adults tales of incompetent internists and unscrupulous produce managers at the Foodtown. That is, the produce managers were at the Foodtown. I’m not clear on where the dopey doctors were, since I was only listening with one ear.

  My mind was on Stephanie and Legs and Lester. Clearly, Lester had been in the room when the stabbing took place. He had been scheduled to visit the Gibsons that weekend, and his DNA, or that of the man whose hair he was borrowing, was found in the room. Someone had cleaned up some stains on the floor, which may or may not have been blood.

  “. . . two for ninety-nine, when clearly it should have been labeled two for fifty-nine,” my mother was saying. Abby was doing a much better job of looking fascinated than I was, but Abby, generally speaking, is a nicer person than I am. And she wasn’t going to confront a murderer in a hotel room the next day. Or a non-murderer.

  Meanwhile, back at the window, there was something about that last threatening phone call that had bothered me since I’d hung up the phone. I can’t say I had recognized the voice, but there was a certain familiar cadence to the sentence being uttered that I couldn’t deny. I’m very good at remembering sound—I have a “photographic ear.” I can remember lines of dialogue from movies I saw when I was a child, but my eye is not nearly as talented, and quite often, I forget what I’ve seen. Never, though, what I hear. So there was something about that sound, the syntax, the tone of voice, which I’d heard before. I just couldn’t quite place it, like the bass line of a song that runs through your brain until you can dredge up the melody and identify the music. It was nagging at me.

  “. . . and he never even checked to see if I’d been in before for a hiatal hernia,” my mother continued, disgusted with the state of medicine these days. The fact that these days were undeniably better than those days wasn’t really relevant. The fact that the days two hundred years from now would inevitably be better than now, and that she wouldn’t be here to see them was annoying. I could sympathize with that.

  The children were devastated when their grandmother left, which is to say that Leah tried to turn one hug into seventy-five, and Ethan actually called down from his room, where Play Station was, to say good-bye. The dog, whom my mother had met earlier, followed her to the door, tail wagging eagerly, assuming that she was going to take him for a walk. Instead, Abby did the honors after my mother left.

  I had trouble sleeping that night. It wasn’t dread, since I did-n’t really think I’d be in much danger no matter what happened (but then, I’m usually wrong about such things), but more a feeling of disappointment that kept me awake until one-thirty. Abby slept peacefully, even though I had told her about my plans for the next day and she, supportive spouse that she is, had informed me that she would never speak to me again if I got myself killed, which seemed reasonable.

  Warren was up when I got out of bed at seven-thirty, after having tossed and turned fitfully, while sleeping just a bit overnight. Everyone else was still asleep, and the fact was, he did have nice big brown eyes and floppy ears, and his tail wagged quite adorably when he thought you were going to take him out. So what the hell—I took him out.

  Much as I hate to admit it, I found the experience to be pretty enjoyable. You could think more clearly when you were concerning yourself with nothing more than the toilet habits of an animal considerably lower to the ground that you are. And since very few humans are lower to the ground than I am, I found a certain comfort in Warren’s short little legs attached to the big basset hound paws. He was disproportionate, which seemed just about right for my household.

  Damn mutt was growing on me.

  It was during the walk through Edison Park, two blocks to the east of my house, that the facts of the Legs Gibson story all came together in my head. There was only one way it all made sense, and even though the sense it made was pretty nonsensical, as that other great freelance writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used to put it—and I’m paraphrasing—when the impossible is eliminated, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be true. Sir Arthur used up all the good lines for the rest of us.

  By the time I reached the house, carrying my plastic bag with Warren’s contribution to the walk inside it, I had convinced myself that I was right. So I dumped the bag in one of our outside garbage cans (no sense bringing that stuff into the house), marched inside, and called Barry Dutton’s office. Strangely, at eight on a Saturday morning, the chief of police wasn’t in. Barry and Mason Abrams were proving that you can’t ever find a cop when you need one.

  I left Barry a message detailing what I had planned for the day, then called Abrams’ number and left him the same message, knowing he wouldn’t be back until Monday. Maybe he’d check his messages. In any event, the cops should know what a freelance writer knows, whether the writer really knows it or not.

  Abby came downstairs a few minutes after I got off the phone, dressed for her morning run around the park. She, of course, looked ravishing, but in an athletic way. I gave her a kiss and held her too long.

  “I have to take Mr. Dog for a walk,” she said.

  “Mr. Dog and I just got back,” I informed her, and her eyebrows rose a couple of feet from their normal position.

  “Oh, really?” she said, her voice indicating amusement. “So you’re starting to like Warren, huh?”

  “I never minded Warren,” I said, using all the spin techniques I learned during my disastrous six months in public relations. “But I don’t want to be th
e first line of responsibility for him. It was the concept of a dog I opposed, not the particular dog himself.” I gave my wife another squeeze for good measure (and because I wanted to), and she went off to exercise, laughing to herself at how easy I am to manipulate.

  On Saturday, you can count on Ethan to sleep until roughly Sunday, so I wasn’t expecting him downstairs anytime soon. Leah, however, rarely sleeps late, and sure enough, Abby was barely out the door before she came downstairs, brushed past me like I was part of the furniture, and launched herself at the dog, who looked positively terrified at the sight of this eight-year-old female projectile advancing on him.

  “Look at that face!” she cooed, and went about informing the dog, at great length, of how adorable he was.

  “Nice to see you, too,” I said to my daughter, who at one time in her life, however briefly, had believed me to be the most wonderful person on the planet.

  “Good morning, Daddy,” she replied by rote, and set about petting the dog until surely his fur would be worn off.

  I hadn’t expected Stephanie to call until late in the afternoon, but the phone rang about eleven in the morning, when Ethan was just coming down the stairs, dressed in the boxer shorts and Star Wars T-shirt he had slept in. The kid was born to live in a frat house. I pointed to my clothes and then upstairs, indicating that he should get dressed. He walked past me into the kitchen.

  “I’m in the car, and I just passed Baltimore,” Steph said. “I called ahead to the Hyatt, and I’ll be in Room 716. Check in time is three, and I should be there by three-thirty. Can you meet me there as soon as I get in?”

  “Sure,” I told her. “Call me as soon as you’re in the hotel. I’m only a few minutes away.”

  She agreed and hung up, choosing not to make small talk. The tension in her manner was palpable, and I wondered if she were afraid that I knew something, or afraid that I didn’t. I had my suspicions, but I couldn’t be sure.

  Abby, fresh from a shower, could cause most grown men to weep openly, but I have grown hard-hearted in the fourteen years we’ve been married, and only got a trifle teary-eyed. I told her about Stephanie’s call, and gave her the timing for the rest of the day. She wasn’t happy about it, but agreed that I had the right idea. Then I called Mahoney and told him. He’d been in his garage, where he has every tool in the world and a set of free weights, pumping iron and planning to construct a built-in stereo cabinet for his home theatre. I asked him if being perfect took up a lot of his time, but he said I’d have to ask his wife.

  He showed up at my door in the Trouble-mobile, his work van with the bald tires, old dents, and only half of all the tools in the world, at 1:45, as planned. I gave Abby a kiss, a long one, and she gave one to Mahoney. A short one, I was pleased to note. The kids were attempting to wash the dog with a garden hose and a bucket, and finding that beagle/bassets do not much care for water, and are downright averse to soap.

  Mahoney walked over and touched Warren under the chin. The dog looked up, and immediately sat. His tail wagged, but he never moved. Mahoney told him to stay, and walked back to where I was standing with Abby. The dog didn’t move.

  “Nice dog,” Mahoney said.

  We got into the van and drove the enormous distance into New Brunswick in about four minutes. The Hyatt is just past the Raritan River, over the bridge from Midland Heights, and we were in the lobby (luckily, there is self-parking at the Hyatt, or we’d have had to endure the horrified look of a valet at the sight of the Trouble-mobile) by two o’clock on the nose.

  “Have you figured out how to get into the room before Stephanie gets here?” Mahoney asked casually.

  “Follow my lead,” I said. “If check-in time is three, they’re cleaning the room just about now.”

  We took the elevator up to the seventh floor and walked down the aisle to Room 716. Sure enough, both 716 and 718, next door, had their doors open, and the cart with the cleaning supplies was parked between the two.

  Vacuuming could be heard from 716. Mahoney and I looked into 718, saw what we needed to see, and walked inside.

  The rooms were adjoining rooms, and the doors were open on both sides so the maid could get in and out of either room whenever she needed to. At the moment, she was busy working on the rug in 716, and didn’t hear or see us in the adjoining room.

  “Has she done the bathroom yet?” I hissed at Mahoney. He stuck his head in and nodded, yes, the bathroom had been cleaned.

  We scuttled into the bathroom. Fortunately, the shower had a door, not a curtain, and we both managed to get inside and wait without causing so much commotion that the maid, in the next room with the vacuum going, would notice.

  “This is not my idea of a great Saturday afternoon,” Mahoney said. “If I’m going to spend time in a shower with someone, I’d prefer it not be you.”

  “Quiet,” I told him. “We have to make sure we get out before she locks those adjoining doors.”

  Sure enough, after about fifteen uncomfortable minutes (being fully clothed in a small shower with another man is, at best, awkward), the maid in the next room seemed finished with her work. I signaled Mahoney, and we crept out of the shower and into Room 718.

  The door was still open, but I saw the cart move past it and toward the next pair of rooms. She was getting ready to finish up.

  Mahoney and I scampered through the adjoining door and into the shower in 716, just to be safe. Within a minute, the adjoining doors were closed and locked, and so was the door to the room we were stuck in. I looked at my watch.

  “We’ve got about an hour and fifteen minutes,” I told Mahoney, and we walked out of the shower, no cleaner than we had been before we got in, and into the room.

  I reached into the canvas bag I’d brought and took out the snacks we’d agreed upon. Wow! Fat Free Chips for me, a box of Ring Dings for Mahoney. I had a bottle of Diet Coke, and he satisfied himself with orange soda. We were an elegant pair.

  It was, of course, a classier hotel room than I’m used to, since our family budget doesn’t always allow for a wet bar, a Jacuzzi, and a king-size bed.

  “We should have used the honor bar instead of bringing our own,” I said. “Then we could have charged Stephanie for the snacks, at about three bucks for a bag of peanuts.” I sat down and arranged the food on the table. “Plenty of time.”

  “Great,” said Mahoney. “I’ll brush up on my canasta.”

  Instead, he actually lay down on the bed (after removing his shoes—ever the gentleman, my best friend) and went to sleep, leaving me an armchair in which to ponder the meaning of life in its many permutations for a little less than an hour. I would have gone to sleep myself, but Mahoney’s snoring could probably be heard in Princeton, NJ, a good sixteen miles to the south.

  That’s why we were caught so completely off guard when the hotel room door opened and the dark trench coat, the dark glasses, and the awful toupee told me that Gibson had entered the room. He was concealing a gun in his right hand.

  “Come on in, Legs,” I said. “Sit down. Relax. Take off your hair.”

  Louis Gibson tore off the dark sunglasses and stared at me. “I’ve always wondered why you called me that,” he said.

  Chapter

  Twenty-Five

  Mahoney was barely awake, and shoeless, and therefore not a terribly useful deterrent to violence. He sat up and started glaring at Legs, who stood in front of us with the hotel room door closed and the gun fully visible now.

  “Actually, it was the reason I knew you were alive,” I said. “But I’m never going to tell you why we call you that.”

  “How will I go on?” Legs said with what he uses for sarcasm.

  “You were right, then?” Mahoney asked.

  “Yeah. Legs, here, has been alive the whole time. You killed your own brother to cover up your embezzlement and give the cops no reason to look for you, didn’t you, Legs?”

  Gibson didn’t answer, but he did take a roll of duct tape out of his trench coat pocket, and motioned Maho
ney into the desk chair. Mahoney didn’t move right away, so Legs put the gun closer to my face and cocked it. That convinced my bodyguard that it might be a good idea to sit in the chair.

  “See, Legs here”—and I could tell every time I used that name it annoyed him, so I resolved to use it as often as possible— “skimmed thirteen million off all the sincere conservative maniacs who sent him money, and he needed to be able to cover it up so he could go on living with all the money, even after the cops or the IRS found out about it, right Legs?” He was trying to figure out how to tape Mahoney to the chair while still holding the gun, and was having a hard time doing it. “You want me to hold the gun for you while you do that, Leggsy?”

  He pointed the gun at me. “Stop calling me that!” he said. “Just trying to help.” Legs went back to pulling on the edge of the tape with his teeth, while moving the gun back and forth from me to Mahoney. I don’t know why, but the image of Legs holding a gun on me just wasn’t all that frightening. Maybe because it was Legs. He’d always been annoying. He’d always been a self-congratulating pest who never conceded that anybody but he could be right, but he was never what you’d call scary. “I can understand your need to cover up the theft, Legs, but your own brother! Isn’t that just a little cold?”

  “You didn’t know him,” Louis Gibson said. “He was the most self-satisfied, egotistical, ill-tempered, pompous. . .”

  “In your gene pool? Who would have thought it?” Mahoney chimed in.

  “He wasn’t the kind of brother you think twice about,” Legs continued, his face a little redder.

  “So you stab your brother in your girlfriend’s apartment after sex, and you dump his body on the bed, put on his clothes, pull the extremely unconvincing toupee off his head and put it on your own, and assume his identity so you can be dead and still have more than thirteen million dollars. Now, that’s family values,” I said.

  “I guess you can take it with you,” Mahoney added. He looked at me. “But wouldn’t the cops do fingerprints, that sort of thing, and find out it wasn’t Legs?”