A Farewell to Legs (23 page)

Not that I had any idea what to do, but a piece of
cake sounded like a good idea. I walked into the kitchen in search
of one before I remembered that Preston Burke was watching through
my front window, and used him as an imaginary diet cop to stop
myself from becoming obese. It was even too early in the morning
for a Diet Coke. Luckily for me, the phone rang.

Lucille Purell Watkins had a Texas twang that could
snap a rubber band. And if it was 9:45 a.m. where I was sitting, it
was 8:45 where she was, so the slurred words and thick
pronunciations that come with drinking were even more jarring than
they normally would be.

“Is this Mr. Aaron Tucker?”

“Last time I checked.”

“This is Lucille Watkins. I’m Branford Purell’s
sister.” At least, I’m pretty sure that’s what she said. I
activated my tape recorder as quickly as I could, but even after
multiple subsequent listenings, Lucille was not easy to
decipher.

“Mrs. Watkins, thank you for calling back.”

“You can call me Lucille. But I don’t understan’ why
you’re calling me about my brother, Mr. Tucker. He’s been gone for
seven year’.”

“I know, Lucille. I’m writing a story about someone
else for
Snapdragon
Magazine, and your brother’s name came
up, so I need some background on him. And you can call me
Aaron.”

I got up and started to pace, which is a habit I
have whenever the call I’m on is not routine, or I have to be on my
best behavior. Like when my mother calls.

“I don’t know what I can tell ya, Aaron. My brother
was a bad guy who killed some women and paid the price for it.”
Lucille was nothing if not to the point.

“Well, tell me. Did he ever mention a man by the
name of Louis Gibson?”

“No. He did know a Marvin Gibson, I think. Worked in
the Mobil station on Route. . .”

“I don’t think that was him, Lucille. Did Branford
ever go to Washington, D.C.? Ever give any money to political
causes, get involved in groups against abortion, anything like
that?” Okay, so I was grasping at straws. I was hanging by a hair,
literally.

“No, sir. I don’t think Branford even noticed there
was politics. Only time he ever joined anything was when he joined
the gun club, and I think that was just to meet girls.” I did my
very best not to speculate on the kind of girls one meets at the
gun club, and pressed on.

“How did Branford make a living after the oil rig
shut down?” I asked. “That must have been tough.”

Lucille took a long pause, which I initially thought
was reflection. After repeated playings of the tape, I finally
discerned a long pull on a bottle of some beverage. From the burp
that followed, I’d guess beer.

“Well, it was rough,” she agreed. “He never really
held a steady job after that. Just bummed around, picked up money
doing odd construction work, but there wasn’t much of that, either.
He actually sold his blood a couple of times for medical research
at a lab near here. Then, he just took to driving around, and as it
turned out, to shooting people.”

“Can you imagine why DNA evidence would surface that
suggests your brother was in a Washington, D.C. apartment a little
over a month ago?”

This time, the pause was out of sheer confusion.
“Did I hear you right? There’s DNA of Branford in Washington last
month?”

“I can’t be sure, but that is the indication.” I was
still pacing, and I’m willing to bet Lucille was on her feet,
too.

“I can’t tell you, Aaron,” she said. “I saw the man
fry more than seven years ago, with my own eyes. If he was in
Washington last month, it’s only because he rose from the dead, and
I don’t think that’s all that likely.”

“No, ma’am,” I said.

B
ranford Purell’s
perplexing insistence on staying dead was not improving my day in
any way, shape, or form. Luckily, Preston Burke was doing his very
best to cheer me up, and had finished his task by 11:30. I stood
back on the sidewalk in front of my house to admire his
hardwork.

“You do nice work, Pres,” I said. “If it was
painted, I’d never know there’d been any damage.”

“I could paint it, Aaron,” he countered. “Another
two hundred, and I’ll scrape and paint the whole thing.”

I weighed the two hundred bucks against the mental
image of me on a ladder in front of my house on the weekend as the
weather turned colder, scraping the thin wood between window panes.
It wasn’t even close.

“Go for it, Preston,” I said. He happily went off to
Haberman’s Hardware for some sandpaper and paint.

The only thing to do now was have lunch. I was still
trying desperately to lose that last nagging twenty pounds, so I
went to Hallie’s Coffee House for a grilled chicken salad, which I
brought home in the environmentally disastrous Styrofoam package
that all New Jersey diners consider
de rigeur
.

You may have noticed that nowhere in that paragraph
did I mention going out to investigate the stink bomb incidents.
You are a remarkably astute reader.

The fact was, I couldn’t bring myself to de facto
accuse little kids without a shred of evidence to back up my
claims. I needed something,
anything
to hang a theory on,
and I had absolutely nothing.

So I pondered, which is what I’m best at before two
in the afternoon. I read Fax McCloskey’s latest missive, detailing
with exhaustive thoroughness the Washington, D.C. Police
Department’s examination of FBI files that had virtually nothing to
do with Legs Gibson’s murder. But it was nice Fax continued to
write. It made me feel part of the D.C. police family.

If I were nine or ten years old, and bought a stink
bomb at the Kwik N’ EZ, why would I choose the girls’ locker room,
the gym, and the boys’ room at school to try out my purchase? Well,
two of those locales, at least, had a common overseer. A grudge
against the gym teacher, of course (I suppose you have a better
idea?). I headed for Buzbee to seek out Hester Van Biezbrook.

Hester, the prototype for all gym teachers, was
roughly 400 years old, and could still put me through a cinderblock
wall if the spirit moved her. She stood about six-foot-three, had
triceps Arnold Schwarzenegger would find intimidating, and spoke in
a voice high enough to qualify as a dog whistle. She was
supervising a game of volleyball when I arrived, breathless from my
two-and-a-half block walk.

“The stink bombs,” I managed.

“What about them?” she asked. Hester wasn’t much
given to small talk, and since Leah had never so much as stepped
out of line once in her class, she didn’t know me very well. The
parents of the squeaky kids get the grease.

“Did somebody have a gripe against you? Some reason
one of the kids would have wanted to get back at you that day?”

She regarded me with a look approaching pity. “You
think that a fifth grader needs a
reason
to throw a stink
bomb into a bathroom? Any ten-year-old boy worth a damn would throw
it into the locker room just to watch the girls run.”

“Yeah, but that’s the point,” I countered. “He
didn’t stick around to watch them run. He threw it and ran. Maybe
he was trying to make a point about the school. And because this is
your part of the school, maybe about you. What do you think,
Hester?”

She thought about it. “There are tons of
troublemakers in those classes,” she said thoughtfully. “I can’t
single one out just because he pisses me off. And there wasn’t
anybody who specifically had a gripe on those days. Nope, this was
the nasal equivalent of joyriding, Mr. Tucker.” And before I could
go on, she was off to dock one team of girls a point for spiking
the volleyball, something I was impressed they could even do.

You’d have thought the whole stink bomb thing would
have died down by now, anyway, but I’d seen an article in the
Central Jersey Press Tribune
detailing a meeting of the
Buzbee PTO in which it was actually suggested that the girls’
locker room be padlocked
while the girls were inside
to
prevent further incidents. It wasn’t until someone in the crowded
meeting yelled the word “fire” that the padlock suggestion was
tabled indefinitely.

I went home and caught the spectacle of Preston
Burke carefully painting my bow window, which was quite a sight.
With a very thin brush and a straight edge, he was avoiding any
splash of paint on the window glass itself. I felt I was intruding
on a private moment.

Inside, the answering machine was flashing, and
there was a message from Stephanie. “I’m sorry about the scene with
the boys and Lester,” she said. “If you want to re-interview them,
I’ll set something up on the phone.”

I didn’t think Stephanie’s sons knew much of
anything about the murder, although there were clearly
undercurrents to this family that Carl Jung would find scary. And
there was, now, a pretty tight deadline, and no reason to waste
time. So I called her back and said I didn’t see a need for a new
interview, that the waters had been muddied enough by the first
one, and let it be known that if I never actually came into contact
with Lester again, I wouldn’t weep into my pillow at night.

“He can be a trial,” she admitted. “I can’t wait
until all this is over, and I can go back to having a life
again.”

“I’ve never been involved in the death of a public
figure before,” I told her. “How long do you think it’ll take
before you can put this behind you?”

“It would be a big step if they found out who did
it, so I did-n’t have to worry about being arrested every waking
minute,” said Steph. It must be an awful bother to have to plan
your day around being arraigned and making bail, and never knowing
when such activities might be coming up.

“Who do you suspect?” I’d never actually asked.

“Tell you the truth,” Stephanie said, “I think the
woman he was sleeping with did it herself. And knowing Louis in
situations like that, I’m not entirely sure I blame her.”

I didn’t bother to tell her that the police had
almost definitively eliminated Cherie Braxton as a suspect, for one
thing because she lacked the upper body strength to get a kitchen
knife through Legs’ rib cage and into his heart. Besides, she
didn’t like Legs enough to kill him, from what I could tell.

“Well, I’m supposed to write about it by Monday,” I
said, “and I haven’t a clue what I’m going to say.”

“Well, if you need any help, you know who to call,”
she said, and we hung up.

By the time the kids got home, I’d exhausted all my
best ways to procrastinate, Burke had quit for the day, and my
children were mystified at my insistence on helping them with their
homework, despite their not needing any help. Leah went so far as
to retreat to her room, turn on the CD player, and close the door,
all to keep out the guy who still does long division the old way.
It’s hell being middle-aged.

Abby got home a little early, and I went upstairs to
get dressed for the conference with my brain trust. She walked into
the bedroom and started changing from her work clothes.

“Did Burke finish the window?” she asked. I told her
about the fine job he’d done, and how we had devoted an extra
couple hundred to the beautification of our front window. She
nodded. “He’s still pretty creepy, though, isn’t he?”

“I don’t know. I’m starting to like him.”

“He’s not in love with
you
,” she pointed
out.

“Well, it’s no wonder he’s crazy about you,” I said,
embracing her. “You drive me wild, walking around in various states
of undress.”

“Luckily, I don’t do that very often at the office,”
she said. “Besides, I could probably drive you wild if I dressed
like the Michelin Man.”

I considered that. “Wait. I’m picturing that. Wow.
Yes, you could.”

She broke the clinch and put on a sweatshirt and
sweatpants. “I’m just still a little concerned about Burke,” she
said. Abby waited, but got no response. “Aaron, are you
listening?”

“No, I’m picturing you dressed in tires.”

“It’s driving you wild, isn’t it?”

“Just as you knew it would, you tease,” I said.

“You’re a very scary person, Aaron,” she said. “Now,
get dressed and go talk to the boys from Bloomfield.”

Spoil-sport.

“
O
kay, so Stephanie Jacobs
is smashing her boobs into you, and you’re telling her to cut it
out?” Mark Friedman was shaking his head, incredulous. “What’s
wrong
with you, Tucker?”

“I’m terminally married,” I said.

We were sitting around a large table, the five of
us. Muntbugger’s had been warned ahead of time, but took no
reservations. So I’d had to wait for about fifteen minutes while
the troops gathered (I’d gotten there first, feeling some
responsibility for the occasion). Now, all of us having ordered and
already downing a beer, I was getting the others up to speed on the
state of the Legs Gibson investigation. Apparently, my conduct
during a crucial episode was somewhat disappointing to my friends,
or at least Friedman.

“I’m married, too, but I’m not
that
married,”
Friedman said.

“You were at Aaron’s wedding,” Mahoney said. “Don’t
you remember Abby?”

“I was pretty drunk,” Friedman noted.

I took a picture of Abigail out of my wallet and
showed it to him. Friedman’s voice dropped to a rasp. “Okay,” he
said, “I see your point. Can I keep this?”

“No.” I snatched it out of his hand and put it back
into my wallet. I’d have to clean it off later.

“It’s not that I don’t want to see pictures of your
wife,” Greg Wharton said, “but I don’t think that’s why you asked
us to come here, is it, Tucker?”

“No, thanks, Wharton. I have one question to ask
each of you, and I’d appreciate it if you’d each think very
carefully about it before you answer. There may be follow-up.”