A Farewell to Legs (24 page)

I took the tape recorder out and put it in the
center of the table. And the four of them burst into such a storm
of laughter that people at tables in all directions around us
looked over, shook their heads, and despaired at the state of
middle-aged men in America.

“What the hell is that thing for?” Mahoney gasped
through guffaws. “We going to sing later?”

I was prepared for the outburst. “I’m working,” I
said. “If I’m going to quote you idiots, I need to get it right,
and I don’t plan on taking notes all through dinner.”

“Is
Snapdragon
paying for dinner?” McGregor
wanted to know. “I didn’t order the filet mignon sandwich, but if
they’re buying, I could always change.”

“Maybe they are,” I said. “If what you guys tell me
is any help at all, I’ll put it on my expense sheet.” There was
much hand-rubbing, smiling, and eye-widening at that remark.
Friedman ordered himself an Anchor Steam. McGregor didn’t change to
the steak sandwich, but he did add steak fries to his order. They
make them waffle style at Muntbugger’s.

It was McGregor who finally sat back and put his
hands behind his head in a gesture of relaxation and preparedness.
“What are your questions?” he asked. Thank god for McGregor.
Otherwise, we’d have sat there all night trying to make each other
laugh, and succeeding most of the time. High school friends are
easy.

“I’m going to start with Wharton,” I said. “He gets
two questions, one for being a politician, and another for being a
doctor.”

“Osteopath,” he corrected.

“What is an osteopath, anyway, Greg?” McGregor
asked. “Sounds like somebody who attacks you with the bones of his
last victim.”

“That’s very amusing,” Wharton said sourly. “We’re
the most misunderstood branch of the medical profession. Why, if
internists had to know half of what. . .”

“Save the electioneering for the politician
question,” Friedman said.

I saw my opening and dove in. “Let’s say somebody in
Washington wanted Legs Gibson dead,” I started. “What kind of idiot
would they have to be to do something about it?”

“A big idiot,” Wharton said immediately. “You don’t
kill the people you disagree with. You make their lives miserable
and then make sure you smear them so much they can’t get re-elected
and have to go work for a living. Killing them is just way too
quick. There’s not enough suffering. Besides, there’s the whole
‘getting caught’ thing that can put a crimp in your campaign.”

The waiter brought our dinner, so I turned off the
recorder until everyone was well hunkered down. When I turned it
back on, numerous groan-worthy puns later, I was asking Friedman
about carpets.

“Let’s say we’re in a room with a light beige
carpet,” I started.

He cut me off. “What kind of carpet?” He asked.

“Light beige,” I repeated.

“Deep pile, shag, shallow pile, wall-to-wall, area
rug, old, new, Scotchguard, no Scotchguard, what?” Friedman’s tone
indicated that he was talking to a complete moron, and was
exasperated for having had to explain himself further. “Polyester
blend, wool, what kind of material?”

“I’d say deep pile, wall-to-wall,” I started. “It’s
a rental apartment, so my guess would be that every unit has the
same rug.”

“Carpet,” he corrected. “A rug is something that
doesn’t go wall-to-wall.”

“Or something that Wharton could use on that bald
spot,” McGregor noted, to some hoots.

“Better than that comb-over Legs was doing, from
what I could see on the news,” Mahoney chimed in.

“Let’s not stray too far from the topic at hand,” I
urged.

“Topic at head,” McGregor interjected. I ignored
him, and pressed on.

“The carpet, Friedman, the carpet.”

“What about it?”

“Okay, so it’s beige, right? And whatever pile I
said it was, and a rental apartment carpet, so it’s probably not
the most expensive one left in the warehouse.”

“Okay,” Friedman said. “So?”

“So let’s say, for the sake of argument, that
there’s one area on the ru. . . carpet that’s a little
bit darker than the rest of it. What does that tell me?”

Friedman looked at me with disdain. “You don’t have
to be a carpet expert to figure that out,” he said. “Something’s
been spilled on the rug.”

“Carpet,” Wharton corrected.

“I’m willing to bet that area was a little stiffer
than the rest, no matter how many times it had been vacuumed,
right?” Friedman asked.

“That’s right,” I said, prompting him to pontificate
on the art of rugging a little more. Reporting isn’t about talking.
It’s about getting others to talk. It’s something the TV people
have never figured out.

“And it stood up a little bit more, didn’t it?” he
said, essentially repeating himself, but I let him go on, to see if
he’d reach the conclusion I wanted. I nodded. “So then, something
was spilled on it, but there was no stain, right? I mean, no
discoloration.”

“No, that’s right. It was a little darker, but not a
different color than the rest.”

Friedman smiled a smug smile. The wise old expert on
Aladdin’s mode of transport would now dispense his hard-earned
expertise, if we were men with sufficient sense to stop chewing
long enough to hear it.

“So what happened was, something was spilled on the
carpet,” Friedman began.

“And we don’t have to be Einstein to figure out what
that was,” Wharton said. I gave him the patented stare I give my
kids to shut them up, but on Wharton, in this case, it had the
opposite effect than the one my children employ: Wharton actually
shut up.

“And whatever it was, it was mopped up just about
immediately,” Friedman went on, ignoring both Wharton and the
byplay that had gone on between Wharton and me. “Because you’re
right, Tucker, if it’s in a rental, it was probably a cheap carpet,
so if it had been left to stain for even a couple of minutes, it
probably would have left a noticeable discoloration.”

“What do you use to mop up liquid on a rug?” I
asked, not being well schooled in the art of cleaning. And if you
don’t believe me, come to my house sometime.

“Best thing right away is club soda,” he said. “So
it doesn’t leave a stain, but the fabric is left with a change in
texture, and that’s why you can notice it, if you look, and feel
it, if you touch it or walk on it.”

“Whart,” I said, “if someone is stabbed in the
heart, I assume that would cause a pretty massive blood loss. Would
I be wrong?”

“Well, there’d be a lot of immediate spurting,” he
said. “You have to figure that a wound to the heart, if the heart
were contracted, or beating, at the time, would last for a few
beats of the heart, expansions and contractions, at the very least.
So blood would be spraying all over for at least a few seconds.”
“The police report indicated that there was a good deal of blood on
the bed,” I said. “Would that be consistent with the kind of wound
you’re talking about?”

Wharton thought for a moment, chewing carefully on
his cheddar burger. Finally, he regarded me and pointed a finger.
“Can I have one of your fries?” he said.

I handed him one, probably without even thinking.
“What about the blood, Whart?”

“You told us to consider our answers carefully,
didn’t you?” he asked through a mouthful of potato. “I’m
considering.”

“Not to mention raising your intake of carbohydrates
by about six zillion percent,” Friedman added.

“From what you’ve told me, the wound was a single
wound, delivered through the rib cage and into the heart,” Wharton
said finally. “That’s a strong person pushing that knife, or a
really, really angry one pumped up by adrenaline.”

“So there’d be a bunch of blood?” I asked, trying to
get him back to the question.

“Not as much as in the first few seconds of a head
wound,” Wharton said. “But for maybe ten or fifteen seconds, the
blood would be flying, and not in any predictable pattern. It
wouldn’t be pretty in the room, I’ll tell you that.”

“If he’s stabbed while he’s lying on the bed, would
it fly far enough that there’d be a stain almost at the foot of the
bed, and to the side, like where you’d put your shoes, if you were
neat?”

Wharton thought about that for a while, too, until I
realized he wanted another French fry. Given that, he said, “No,
I’d say probably not. The heart would pump out blood, but not in
arcs. It would fly up, miss the bed, and then hit just the one spot
at the foot of the bed. There would have to be a lot of other dark
spots on the rug to indicate that was what happened.”

“So if there is just the one spot, and a relatively
large one, at the base of the bed, what does that tell us?” I
asked.

“One of two things,” Wharton said, washing down his
pilfered potato with some of McGregor’s beer. “Either he was killed
near the foot of the bed and fell down. . .” he tailed
off.

“Or what?”

“Or that wasn’t blood that got washed up at the foot
of the bed. Could be other bodily fluids.”

Emitted was a loud group grimace that you can
actually hear on the cassette tape, and Mahoney made a comment
about not discussing such things in front of open food. I turned to
McGregor.

“Okay, Alan, let’s talk money.” McGregor brightened
considerably, about to show us his level of expertise. Everyone was
glad not to be discussing bodily fluids.

“What money?”

“About thirteen million dollars that’s missing from
the Legs Gibson ‘You’d-Better-Have-My-Values’ Foundation. If I want
to see where that money came from, and even more fun, where it
went, what do I have to do?”

McGregor grabbed his beer back from Wharton, who
looked annoyed, and took a long drag on the bottle. Then he put it
back down on the table, out of Wharton’s reach.

“Ask,” he said.

“Ask? Ask whom?” I was showing off my grammatical
expertise here. I was an English major in college, you know.

“Ask the Foundation. Believe it or not, Gibson’s
American Values thing is a not-for-profit organization. That means
the books are a matter of public record, and anybody can ask for an
accounting whenever they feel like it. You gotta love America.”
McGregor grinned at that.

“So if I just call up and say hi, I’m a member of
the public, and I’d like to see your books for the past three
years, they have to give them to me?” Wheels were spinning in my
head that I had-n’t used since freshman economics, a class I almost
never attended.

“That’s right. Of course, if there was illegal
activity, I’d be surprised to see it labeled that way. Somebody had
to find a way to skim off the money without being obvious about
it.” McGregor’s eyes got dreamy, like he was trying to come up with
the right way to do such a thing. If this went on too long, he’d be
trying to get Max Bialystock to invest in a musical about Hitler by
the time dessert came.

“If you saw the books, would you be able to figure
it out?”

He came back to earth. “I don’t know,” McGregor
said. “It depends on how clever the person doing the skimming
was.”

“Let’s say the person was Legs Gibson.”

“Twelve seconds,” McGregor said without boasting.
“Less, if Legs was distracted.”

Mahoney had been sitting, semi-quietly, at the other
end of the table all night, but all the activity had gotten to him.
“Why am I here, again?” he asked. “Was it just to make sure that
Friedman doesn’t break the bank ordering exotic beers he couldn’t
recognize without the labels?”

“I resent that,” Friedman said, draining an amber
with a Hungarian label. “I don’t deny it, but I resent it.”

“You are here,” I told Mahoney, “for a number of
reasons. First of all, you organized the evening, so it’s only fair
you should have to suffer through it like the rest of us. Also, you
are my closest and largest friend, and therefore are necessary in
case a fist-fight breaks out over the last French fry. And last,
but certainly not least, you are here because I have a question
about the operations of Newark International Airport, which as I
recall is your base of operations, professionally speaking.”

He took on a smile which could only be described as
beatific. “So it is,” Mahoney said.

“How often does a shuttle run from Newark to
Washington, D.C., and vice versa?” I asked.

“About every fifteen or twenty minutes, if you
factor in all the airlines running them,” he said. “It’s a short
flight, only a little over an hour, and lots of business guys go
back and forth all the time, so that’s where the airlines make
their money.”

“How about on Saturdays?” I asked.

“It’s not all that different,” Mahoney answered.
“Some business guys are coming home from the Friday meetings that
run late. Some tourists go down for a weekend. Some other business
guys go down there to get ready for the Big Meeting that’s coming
up Monday morning. The weekend schedule isn’t very different from
the weekly one.”

“How long does it take to rent a car at the
airport?” I said. There were groans all around the table, and
Mahoney’s eyes narrowed.

“Not that long,” he said with too much emphasis,
defending his chosen profession with authentic zeal. “If you have
one of those club cards, where you can do everything over the
Internet or on the phone, you can literally take a shuttle to the
gate, pick up the car they told you to take from the lot, and
leave. With the shuttle or the monorail at the airport, maybe
twenty minutes, tops. More if you’re waiting for baggage.”

“You spend a lot of time on the roads in our beloved
state,” I said. “How long from Newark Airport to Scotch Plains on a
Saturday late afternoon/early evening?”

“Maybe half an hour,” Mahoney estimated.

“So if I were in D.C. at five, I could conceivably
be in Scotch Plains by seven-thirty without breaking a sweat?”

“It’d be close,” Mahoney said, “but if you planned
ahead, it’s possible. There’s one problem with your theory,
Inspector,” he added.