A Farewell to Legs (19 page)

Abrams set his jaw, and turned his head to make
direct eye contact with me. His eyes weren’t amused.

“He’s dead,” Abrams said. “Branford T. Purell was
executed seven years ago.”

A
brams and I exchanged
incredibly unlikely suggestions on how a dead man’s hair could make
it into a live secretary’s apartment seven years after he met his
end in Texas, but neither of us was terribly enthusiastic about our
theories. Mine, that he had been put to death unbelievably slowly
by watching an attractive woman have sex with all sorts of other
men, was not entirely serious. Abrams suggested it would lead to a
new form of cruel and unusual punishment: death by pornography.

I thanked him for the information, however weird,
and went back to the hotel. Abby and the kids were at the pool
again, but now I had time to put on a bathing suit and join them,
thus delighting my children and disappointing all the other men at
the pool, who had been watching my wife and hoping she was a
divorcée or a widow. No, I’m not paranoid—they all are truly
against me.

We spent the evening quietly, going out to a
restaurant and avoiding all mention of Legs or Stephanie. After
dinner, the kids retired to their lair to see if Fred Flintstone
had come up with anything new to say since 1966 (it was new to
them), while Abby and I headed to our bedroom to collapse into two
separate exhausted heaps on the bed.

Since my wife is incapable of collapsing into an
exhausted heap without doing at least 30 minutes of prep work in
the bathroom, I had plenty of time to set the stage. I shut off all
the lights in the room except the one over her pillow, then turned
down Abby’s half of the bed. The hotel had been kind enough to
supply a chocolate for her pillow, and I moved it to a spot just
below there.

I stripped down to the boxers with the New York
Yankees emblem she had gotten me as a gag gift for my latest
birthday, and climbed under the blanket. So when Abby (finally)
emerged from the bathroom, she saw a dimly lit, quiet hotel bed,
lavishly made up, with a chocolate and a husband.

And, of course, on her pillow, a screenplay.

She laughed, then walked over and sat down, careful
to pick up the chocolate first. She looked at me and determined
that I was not, in fact, asleep. Then she looked at the script, and
chuckled again.

“
The Minivan Rolls for Thee?”
she asked,
looking at the title.

“Hemingway,” I said.

“I understood the reference,” she admonished. “I’m
just wondering if it’s about. . .”

“It kind of is,” I said. “And it’s kind of not. You
decide.”

Abby lay down, her short pajamas showcasing her
magnificent legs. She picked up the script and opened it.

“You realize I’m not going to read it all tonight,”
she said.

“Of course,” I told her. “I’ll be glad if you get
past page one.”

She bent her magnificent legs to make a reading
stand for the script, and got to work. I did my best not to watch,
but then she chuckled, and I tried to catch a glimpse of which page
she was on, to see what was funny, and whether it had been
intentional.

“Stop watching me,” she said. “You know it makes me
nervous.”

“I wasn’t watching you,” I told her. “I was ogling
your legs.”

“That’s different.”

She went back to reading, and I lay there, eyes
ostensibly closed, appreciating her. Okay, so I was watching to see
if she’d find anything else amusing.

“You’re making this difficult,” she warned.

“Me? I’m as quiet as a mouse.”

“A mouse with a pair of binoculars.”

“They’re still quiet,” I pointed out.

Abby tried valiantly, and I even turned away at one
point, relying on the inevitable closet mirror to watch her. She
caught me looking at her in the mirror, and closed the script.

“Don’t stop,” I said.

She leaned over and put the script on her
nightstand, then turned off the light and reached over to me. Abby
pulled me close to her and kissed me with an impressive amount of
passion for a woman who’d spent all day shepherding two children
around our nation’s capital.

“C’mere,” she said.

“Two nights in a row? You’ll do anything to avoid
reading that script with me in the room, won’t you?”

“Pretty much,” she said.

The next morning (ahem!), I got up early to meet
Stephanie and her sons at Steph’s house, and left a note for Abby
saying I’d meet her and the kids at the hotel before checkout
time.

By the time I navigated the minivan into a parking
space near Stephanie’s house, I was a wreck. If you have a car,
Washington makes even less sense than most cities. They even have
streets that are one-way at certain times of the day, and two-way
the rest of the time. Now, that’s entertainment.

So I was a wee bit late when Steph opened the door.
She had been kind enough to put out a basket of muffins and bagels
on the table, along with a pot of coffee and, in my honor, a
smaller pot of real hot chocolate. The woman had class, I’ll give
her that.

Stephanie introduced me to her sons. The taller one,
Lou Jr., looked me straight in the eye. He has dark, straight hair
and no doubt is his grandmother’s favorite. You couldn’t find
Semitic blood in this kid if you went in with a sewer snake.

He shook my hand like he was damn glad to know me,
and even smiled—the same smile Legs had in all the newspaper clip
photos. I tried not to dislike the kid too quickly on the basis of
his accidental similarity to a noted asshole.

“How can we help you, Mr. Tucker?” My god, the
private schools really had done a bang-up job on this one. He’d be
President of the United States by the end of the week.

“Well, if your mother will be so kind as to leave us
to our business. . .” Stephanie nodded unhappily, took a
worried glance at Jason, which I noticed, and closed the door
behind her. I looked back at Junior.

“You two have been away at school, is that right?”
Always best to start off with something easy, unless you have only
one question to ask.

“Well, I’ve been at college, but it’s just
Georgetown,” Junior began. (“Just Georgetown.” That’s like saying,
“I have a car, but it’s just a Porsche.”) “So I’m around here
pretty frequently. I have an apartment near school, but that’s not
far from here, either.”

I turned to Jason, who had been standing near the
window, but unlike his grandmother, facing into the room. He was
lighter in complexion and hair, and his eyes looked wary. Clearly,
the better interview, because he wasn’t as sure of himself, and
might say something he wasn’t supposed to.

“How about you, Jason?”

“Pringley. It’s in Annapolis.” It wasn’t a mumble,
but it might just as well have been. Jason wanted out of this room,
and now.

“Is it too far for you to visit often?” Now I
sounded like my own mother.

“No, I come down once a month or so.”

“When did you see your father last?”

There was a bit of eye contact between the two
before Junior decided to answer for both of them. “I saw him the
night before it. . . happened. . . and Jason
was here the week before that,” he said.

“Anything unusual? Did he seem tense, or
distracted?”

There was no hesitation this time. “No.”

“Anything going on between him and your mother?”

“No.” Jason still hadn’t moved a muscle, nor was he
attempting to answer for himself.

“What kind of relationship did you have with your
father?”

Junior looked surprised. “He was my father,” he
said, with a degree of “how-stupid-are-you” in it.

“Marvin Gaye’s father shot and killed him. What was
your
relationship like?”

“I respected him,” Junior said, his eyes burning
death rays into my skull. “He had accomplished an enormous amount,
and he was still a relatively young man.”

“How about you, Jason?”

I have no doubt that Jason was about to acquiesce to
my brilliant line of questioning, but he never had the chance. The
dining room door opened, and Lester Gibson walked in. Both boys
seemed uneasy, almost alarmed, at his entrance, and now they both
fell silent.

“So, how have the boys been doing, Mr. Tucker?”
Lester asked, all bonhomie and good feelings. You’d have thought
that we hadn’t exchanged epithets the last time we met. Politics,
it would seem, is a genetic condition.

“They’ve been doing just fine, Lester,” I said.
“Thanks for dropping in to check.” I flashed a look toward the
door, but he wasn’t buying. He actually sat down, just to Jason’s
left. Junior’s eyes never left Lester, but Jason was doing all he
could not to look at the man.

“Good to hear. We wouldn’t want to hold anything
back from the press, now, would we?” Lester took a croissant from
the basket that I would have sworn had only bagels and muffins (it
was a sure bet he wouldn’t take a bagel) and bit off a corner. He
appeared pleased, and nodded his head, as if the maitre d’ was in
the room, agonizing over whether Lester’s croissant was
adequate.

“That’s a very refreshing attitude, Lester,” I said.
“Now, if you don’t mind. . .”

He waved a hand, minor royalty giving the commoners
permission to continue their drab, dreary lives. “Not at all.
Pretend I’m not even here.”

“I’d prefer not pretending,” I told him.

Jason’s eyes rotated in their sockets a bit, and
Junior looked positively shocked. “How dare. . .” he
began.

“I don’t see how my presence would cause a
disruption,” said Lester, cutting him off. He wasn’t looking at
me—his eyes were admonishing Junior for his near-outburst.

“Your presence has already caused a disruption,” I
explained in a calm tone. “You’ve ruined the admittedly lousy
rapport I’d established with the guys here, and now you’re making
it impossible for me to continue with this interview. Was that your
goal? Because both times you’ve been in the room, my interviews
were cut quite short.”

Lester didn’t so much stand as rise—it was a smooth
motion that appeared to have less to do with legs, which have all
sorts of bones and joints that can make for jerky motion, and more
to do with the perfect, ethereal right of the privileged to their
indignation.

“You will leave this house
immediately
,” he
hissed.

“Since when is it your house?” I purred at him. “Get
Stephanie to tell me to go.”

Lester looked toward the door, considering, but this
time, Junior cut
him
off.

“That won’t be necessary,” he said. “This is still
my
house, and I’m asking you to leave, Mr. Tucker.”

So I left. I drove the minivan back to the hotel,
met my lovely wife and children, packed up everything we could
legitimately call our own, and checked out. By the time we hit the
Beltway, I had my cell phone in hand, and was pushing the button to
call Mahoney.

“Hello?

“Mr. Mahoney.”

“Mr. Tucker. How was Washington?”

“I’m still there, but I’m on my way back. I have an
assignment for you.”

“Broken fan belt?”

“No. I’m getting a handle on the Legs Gibson thing.
But I’m going to need to consult with a panel of experts.”

“Such as. . .”

“A carpet expert, a medical expert, a political
expert, an accountant, and someone who understands the workings of
a major airport.”

“Aha.”

“Precisely. Set up an evening with The Guys.”

I
n case you were wondering,
driving from Washington, D.C. to New Jersey with two pre-teenage
children is no more enjoyable than traveling from New Jersey to
Washington, D.C. with two pre-teenage children. Harry Potter had
finished his tale by the time we left Maryland, which left the
15-minute tour of Delaware, and about a two-and-a-half hour stretch
of our home state, to survive without the aid of an apprentice
wizard. The scenery didn’t help, either. I believe it was Charles
Kuralt who once said, “thanks to the Interstate Highway System,
it’s now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing
anything.”

Somehow, though, we managed to make it home in four
pieces, and for once, I was actually glad for the extra room in the
minivan, which had made it possible for Leah to spread out on the
back-back seat while Ethan played Gameboy in the back seat, thus
avoiding any serious bloodshed among the progeny. We pulled into
our lovely crumbling driveway at about seven in the evening, just
in time to unpack and make dinner for four before collapsing into a
sniveling heap on any available sofa. Luckily, Abby did the
cooking.

You have to understand the freelance mentality. We
are an exceptionally paranoid lot. We are convinced that, once we
finish one assignment, we will never get another paying job for as
long as we live. So immediately after the bags were lugged in the
door, and while my wife bravely attacked the food supply in our
refrigerator, and my children busied themselves with television,
video games, and trying to kill each other, I checked my phone
answering machine and my email.

I had not checked my messages from the road, since
Abby gives me a funny look when I do that during a vacation, and
there were twelve messages from the four days we’d been gone. The
first was from my agent, Margot Stakowski of the Stakowski Agency
of Cleveland, Ohio.

“Aaron!” As usual, she sounded shocked. “Didn’t I
tell you there was no market for mysteries? Oh well. I’ll read it
and call you back.”

Margot sounded as enthusiastic as if I’d written a
screenplay about athlete’s foot, but that’s Margot. Hey, if I were
some big-name screenwriter like Charlie Kaufman, I wouldn’t be
represented by someone in Cleveland.

There were two messages from my mother, who
apparently had forgotten I’d told her we were leaving on Thursday.
She was considerably more frantic in the second message than the
first. There was a message from Lydia Soriano at
Snapdragon
,
not at all frantic but asking for a progress report. Leah’s
gymnastics teacher called to ask where she was (I’d forgotten to
call and cancel). Ethan’s friend Chris mumbled something about
coming over to play Play Station. Melissa asked if Leah could come
over and play. An editor at the
Star-Ledger
asked if I might
be interested in a story about the latest in the commercial and
industrial real estate market. A telemarketer asked if we wanted to
refinance our mortgage. And Barry Dutton asked me to call him as
soon as I got back.