A Farewell to Legs (11 page)

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.”

Y
ou 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.”

Abby stood up and walked into the kitchen. I
followed, because there’s no point in trying to get her to stop
going somewhere, and she generally has a good reason. Turned out
she did this time, too, as she reached under the sink for the
garbage bags. She was going to throw the glass and splintered wood
away.

“Wait,” I said, and went into the closet for the
contractor garbage bags, which are heavier and less likely to be
torn by broken glass. “Did you hear any of what I said?”

“Of course.”

“So?”

She turned to me and did a perfect imitation of the
face Leah puts on when she’s in her
“I’m-about-to-become-a-pre-teen-and-boy-are-you-annoying” mood.
“I’m
thinking
!” Abby fussed, and we both chuckled.

This time, she followed me back into the living
room, and we started the process of separating the wreckage the
rock in our window had caused from the wreckage that normally makes
up our living room. I was already thinking about how to cover the
pane of glass that had been damaged until repairs could be made,
and decided that cardboard and duct tape were the way to go.

Abby exhaled, which I took to be a sign the thinking
was over and she had something to say. And sure enough, she said,
“You’re right. It doesn’t make any sense that they’d come after you
as opposed to any of the other reporters. So there’s only one
explanation.”

Intrigued, I looked up, and came close to cutting
off my left pinkie on jagged glass. “Really? What?”

Abigail frowned, and spoke quietly. “They must be
coming after
me
.”

Y
ou have to understand, it
was now after two in the morning, and my mind wasn’t firing on all
cylinders. So I gaped at her for a few seconds, and not in the way
I usually do.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I must have heard you wrong. I
thought you said they were coming after you.”

“I did,” she answered, and I noticed she hadn’t met
my eyes for a while. “That’s the only logical explanation.”

“We need a broom,” I told her, and got up to get
one. Abby stared at me as I left the room, went into the same
closet where I had gotten the bag, and emerged with a broom and
dustpan. I came back into the living room, and she was still
staring.

“Don’t you want me to explain?” she asked.

I began sweeping up the smaller pieces of glass.
“I’d be willing to bet fifty bucks you can’t,” I said. “What the
hell do you mean, the only logical explanation is that people are
coming after you?”

Abby sat down on the stairs again and got a dreamy
look on her face, as if she weren’t actually there in the room with
me. When she spoke, it was as if she were talking to herself.

“I had a case a couple of months ago, a guy who shot
his girlfriend and left her in an alley,” she began.

“I remember,” I told her. “The pro bono case you
were assigned. She was in the hospital for a couple of weeks, but
she’s okay now, right?”

She didn’t appear to have heard me. “The girlfriend
had to have four separate surgeries, but she’s mostly all right.
But the client, the shooter, went to jail.”

“You lost the case.”

This time, Abigail heard me, and her face sharpened.
She met my eyes for the first time in a number of minutes. “It had
a lot to do with the fact that he was really, really guilty,” she
said. “When six people see you shoot somebody, it’s hard to say you
were actually at the Dairy Queen.”

“Sorry.” I dumped the last of the glass into the bag
and put the broom down.

“It’s okay,” she said, dismissing my apology with a
wave of her hand. “Anyway, he got six years. But he got himself
another lawyer, and he’s appealing the decision. The client—his
name is Preston Burke—is out on bail.”

It took me a second. “And you think he’s out to get
you for losing his case?”

“I got a letter at the office last week from him,
and while the language wasn’t direct enough for me to file a
complaint, it was obvious he blamed me for his conviction.”

“Yeah, clearly it was your fault he shot his
girlfriend. You shouldn’t have made him do that,” I said. I sat
down next to Abby on the stairs and put an arm around her. “Why
didn’t you tell me?”