A Farewell to Legs (22 page)

Burke did a double take Soupy Sales would have
envied. “Oh, it is,” he said. “I’m not here in a professional
capacity.”

“You’re here on an amateur basis?”

“No, you don’t understand.” The understatement of
the week. “I’m looking for Abigail Stein on personal business.” He
sucked in his breath, screwing up his courage. “I’m in love with
her.”

I’m ashamed of myself, but I do recall letting out a
laugh. “You’re. . . in love with Abigail Stein?”

“Is that so amusing?”

I walked down and sat next to him. “I’m sorry,
Preston. You have to understand. Abigail Stein is my wife.”

To truly empathize with the look in Burke’s eyes,
you have to know what it is to be in love with Abby. To have
aspired to someone so close to perfection, and then have the rug
pulled out from under you. . . it’s a feeling I hope
never to actually have myself.

“Your wife?”

“Yes,” I told him. “We’ve been married for fourteen
years. We have a twelve-year-old son and an eight-year-old
daughter.” I actually reached into my jacket for my wallet, and
showed him pictures of my children. This, to a man I was pretty
sure five minutes ago was a dangerous maniac.

“Oh, my. . .” Preston Burke was coming
apart at the seams, and I felt awful for him. “All that time when
she was working on my case, the only thing that got me through was
thinking, ‘once this is over, I’ll go and I’ll ask her out.’ And
now. . .”

It occurred to me that he should have seen Abby’s
wedding ring during all those visits, but some people are less
observant than, let’s say, eighty percent of the population. “I
understand how you feel,” I told him. “I’m sorry. I got to her
fifteen years before you did.”

“I thought you said fourteen.” Ah. Now it was
becoming even clearer. Preston Burke was, in all probability, an
adult Asperger’s Syndrome patient, and he didn’t even know it. It
happens all the time, and after you’ve lived with it for a while,
you can spot them a block and a half away.

“We dated for a year before we got married,
Preston.”

“How come she’s not Abigail Tucker?” Burke was
trying to trip me up, prove that Abby wasn’t really my wife.

“Not all women change their names when they get
married.”

He absorbed that. It was all coming down on Burke at
once, but he was used to readjusting his expectations. He stood up.
“What happened to your window?” he asked.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him. Until very
recently, I thought
he
had happened to my window. “Somebody
threw a rock through it,” I told him.

“Why?”

“I have no idea,” I answered honestly.

He walked over and examined the tic-tac-toe pattern
of the window. It looked like we had been playing Hollywood Squares
in our front window, and somebody had thrown a rock through Paul
Lynde and Charley Weaver.

“You have somebody look at this yet?” Burke
asked.

“Yeah,” I said, bewildered.

“How much they charging you for it?” It was my turn
to stare at him for a while.

“They quoted us two thousand.” I didn’t want to tell
him, but I couldn’t think of a reason not to.

Burke looked like his head would explode. His eyes
widened and his mouth dropped open like a wide “O.” “Two thousand
dollars to fix this window?” he gasped.

“No, two thousand dollars to replace the window. The
guy said it couldn’t be repaired.” I was talking to a
six-year-old.

“The guy lied. This window is easily repairable. I
could do it for four hundred.” No,
Burke
was talking to a
six-year-old. “You could?” (Really, Daddy? It just needs new
batteries?) “Sure. Didn’t your wife tell you? I’m a contractor.
That’s how

I make my living. This, here, is maybe a one-day
job. Four hundred, including materials.”

“Three hundred,” I said. “You’re in love with the
owner of the window.”

“Five hundred,” he countered. “She’s married, to
you.”

“Split the difference,” I said magnanimously. “Four
hundred.”

“Deal.” We shook hands.

Preston examined the window and made some
measurements with my tape measure. He kept talking to himself and
nodding, since apparently he agreed with what he was saying. I
walked over when he appeared to be finished.

“When do you think you could do it?” I asked.

“I’m not working now,” he said. “Too many people
still think I’m a serial killer. I can start this afternoon and
finish tomorrow.”

“You’re a fine human being, Preston,” I said. This
was not how I expected this conversation to end up.

“Just one thing.” Uh-oh. Here came the catch.

“Yeah?”

“You’re not from the Bar Association. Who are you,
really?”

I let out my breath and told him the whole story.
Burke seemed shocked that we suspected him.

“You thought it was
me?”
I was personally
offending him. I think he was considering raising the price of the
repair again.

“Well, there was that letter and. . .
look, Preston, that’s over now. And I just have one question to ask
you.”

“Name it.”

“You’re not really Waldrick Malone, are you?”

Preston Burke smiled. And shook his head.

T
he encounter with Burke
left me no time to interview potential hooligan parents before my
kids got home, so I decided to do that first thing tomorrow. The
kids came barreling in just about the time Burke showed up with
some wood, panes of glass he’d cut to size, putty, and other
equipment. He borrowed a ladder from my garage and set to work.

Leah burst in the door and dropped her book bag on
the floor. “Who’s the man on the ladder?” she demanded.

“He’s fixing the window. Go feed your lizard.” She
rolled her eyes and flung herself on the couch, her latest in a
series of defiant gestures.

Ethan was a few steps behind her. He stomped noisily
into the house and dropped his book bag on the floor. “Can I go on
the Internet and look for dogs?” he asked.

“Do your homework.”

He shrugged, got his books out of the bag, hung the
bag up on the banister, and got to work on his homework, sitting on
the floor next to the couch and working on the coffee table (in
this case, the homework table). He had to avoid sitting on his
sister, who was writhing on the couch now, since just flinging
herself onto it had not produced the desired response.

“Leah, feed the lizard and do your homework.”

“Ahhhhhhhh!” The sound that emanated from her throat
can’t be accurately translated into letters and punctuation. It was
the kind of thing that took the sound effects artists who worked on
The Exorcist
three months to produce, with layer upon layer
of wild animal noises, squeaky doors, and the transmission of a
1942 Nash. But she got up and stomped into the kitchen to fetch the
tasty treat for Little Zilla.

While she was upstairs, the phone rang. “Hi,
Aaaaaaron,” said a minuscule voice. “Is Leeeeeeah there?”

“Hi, Meliiiiiiisa,” I said. “She’s feeding the
liiiiiiizard.”

But Leah was already harrumphing down the stairs,
still glaring at me, and I pointed to the phone in my hand, then to
the one on the kitchen wall. She didn’t smile, but nodded.

She and Melissa were deep into conversation when I
heard a loud scuffle outside the window. I looked out, and two
Midland Heights police officers were holding Preston Burke’s arms.
They’d clearly pulled Burke down off the ladder, and were talking
to him. He appeared perplexed.

I opened the door and called to the one I knew. “Hey
Craw-ford,” I said. “It’s okay.”

“Isn’t this the guy the chief told us to watch for
outside your house?” Crawford said. “He was doing something to your
front window.”

“Yeah,” I said, walking down the stairs to them.
“He’s fixing it. I hired him.”

The two cops looked at each other, then Crawford
shrugged. They let Burke’s arms go. “That’s what he said,” Crawford
reported. “But you can understand. . .”

“Don’t worry about it,” I told him. “You did your
job exactly right. I’ll tell the chief.”

“Can I come in for a minute?” Crawford asked. I knew
he was just checking to see if Burke had, in some way, taken my
children hostage and was coercing me into letting him repair my
window, so I waved Crawford into the house while his partner
continued to question Burke.

Crawford looked around and saw one 12-year-old boy,
approaching his father’s height, with his knees on the floor, his
hands on the coffee table and his feet on the sofa, and one
eight-year-old girl, approaching the height of the average lawn
gnome, sprawled out flat on the floor in the kitchen, phone cord
tracing to the wall five feet above her head.

In other words, the usual at my house.

“Situation normal,” I told Crawford. “He’s telling
you the truth. But I appreciate your concern.”

He collected his partner and drove off. I made a
mental note to call Barry Dutton and commend their work. Burke
walked over to me as soon as they drove off.

“This is one secure community,” he said. “I should
think about moving here.”

We went on like that for the rest of the afternoon.
Melissa invaded for a while, and the two girls played on the swing
I hung off the roof of our patio (we don’t actually have what you’d
call a backyard), doing tricks designed to give me a massive
coronary, until it was time for me to start cooking dinner for the
kids.

I got out some pieces of frozen fried chicken for
Ethan, since he refuses to eat virtually anything that is cooked
under our roof, and put them in the oven on a cookie sheet lined
with aluminum foil. Then I cut some potatoes very thin, sprayed
them with cooking oil, and put them on another cookie sheet,
similarly prepared, to “fry” in the oven. For Leah, I dredged a
piece of boneless chicken breast in matzo meal, then seasoned it
with the Colonel’s recipe of eleven herbs and spices, eight of
which are salt, and put that on the same sheet as Ethan’s dinner.
The sound I heard off in the distance was James Beard spinning in
his grave.

Just about the time I started calculating my
children’s cholesterol levels, the door opened and Abby, looking as
flustered as I’ve ever seen her, came in and pointed at the
door.

“Isn’t that. . . do you know
who. . . why is. . . Aaron!”

It was so cute, I could barely stand explaining the
situation to her, but by the time I got to how Burke was saving us
$1,600, Abby was grinning. We sat in the kitchen until Burke
knocked on the door to say he was leaving, and would be back in the
morning. Abby and I waved, and he sighed (I like to think) and
walked out.

“It’s a shame,” I said. “That there aren’t two of
you to go around.”

“Maybe the guy who looks like him has a sister who
looks like me,” Abigail said.

I snuggled close to her and kissed her on the cheek.
“Looks are not all there is to you,” I said. “She’d have to be the
most wonderful woman in the world, too.”

“Aaron, you make such lovely use of hyperbole.”

Silly woman. She thought I was exaggerating.

T
he next morning, I was all
set to start interviewing parents of miscreants, but by the time I
got back from the Y, helped Burke get set up, took a shower, and
got dressed, it was too late even to consider such a thing (okay,
so it was 9:30, but I just couldn’t think of a way to do this
gracefully). Freelancers are without question the finest, most
diligent procrastinators on the planet.

Still, there were at least two other mysteries to be
solved, and one of them was actually a paying job, so I called
Lydia Soriano at
Snapdragon
to keep the boss happy. That was
easier said than done.

“I called over the weekend, Aaron, and today is
Wednesday,” she said grumpily. “Couldn’t you have called
sooner?”

“I was away in Washington, actually doing interviews
for the story,” I told her. “My wife doesn’t let me check in for
messages while we’re away.”

She laughed. “Well, she’s a wise woman. What have
you found out so far?”

I filled her in on my minute progress, and told her
about the hair and the gathering I had organized for the evening.
“At the very least, I figure I can get the guys to talk about what
Legs was like in the old days,” I said.

“It’s decent background,” she said. “But if I want
to get it into an issue that’s going to be at all relevant to the
event, you’re going to have to write something soon, Aaron.”

“How soon?”

“Like, Monday.” I believe something akin to a sharp
intake of breath took place on my end of the phone. “Okay,” I
breathed.

“It’s been over a month since the assignment,” Lydia
reminded me. “I know I haven’t been breathing down your neck, but
if I hold this much later than the January issue, it’s going to be
such old news that my readers will wonder why we ran it at
all.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “But does there have to be a
solution to the mystery in the article?”

I have no idea what Lydia Soriano looks like, so the
image of a woman pursing her lips in thought is probably just
conjecture. Besides, the woman looked a little like Abigail.

“I don’t want to press you for it, Aaron, since any
arrests will hit the papers long before we run a story, but if we
run a story that doesn’t at least speculate on who killed Gibson,
and arrests are made in the interim, we’re going to look awfully
foolish.”

“Okay, Lydia. I’m close. Really. I’ll have something
for you Monday.”

“Thanks, Aaron. And, if this works out, there may be
more we can do in the future.” We hung up.

Four days to unravel Legs Gibson’s murder, and all I
had was a hair from a dead man and a whole lot of missing
money.

Piece of cake.