A Farewell to Legs (8 page)

“Well, what are you doing about it?”

“The question isn’t what
I’m
doing about
it—it’s whether
you’re
doing something about it, and if so,
who asked you to do it.”

I actually looked away from him. “I’m. . .
not at liberty to say.”

He snorted. It’s rare you get to hear someone snort,
but he did it well. “What is this, freelance writer-client
privilege? You’re not a private investigator, Aaron.”

“No. I looked into becoming one, but the state
regulations are that you have to have. . .”

“. . . Five years of experience as a
police officer or investigator with an organized police department
of a state, county or municipality or an investigative agency of
the United States, or any state, county, or municipality.” Barry
said it all with what appeared to be enjoyable malice. “I’ve read
the regs, and we’ve discussed them before.”

I fixed him in my gaze. “So you also know that in
order to become a police officer in this state, you have to be
under 35 years of age. So my time to start getting five years in as
an investigator. . .”

Barry grinned. “. . . Passed about ten
years ago.”

“Eight.”

“Nevertheless. That doesn’t explain what I’m going
to tell Mr. Rebinow about his store. He’s got fresh produce in
there, for crissakes, and now he’s going to have to close for two
days.” Barry closed his eyes and rubbed them with an enormous thumb
and forefinger.

“That may be produce, but it sure as hell ain’t
fresh. Besides, the guy doesn’t seem to care what happens to the
stink bombs he sells unless they get used in his store. I don’t see
where I broke any laws. Doesn’t he have anti-stink-bomb
insurance?”

Barry’s eyes opened wide again, and he started to
point a finger at the sky, then gave it up. “Anti-stink-bomb
insurance. What am I going to do with you?”

“You sound like me, talking to Ethan. Barry, while
I’m here. . .”

“Oh god, you get pulled in for pulling a prank a
nine-year-old would be ashamed of, and now you’re doing to ask me
to help you,” Barry moaned. “Where do you get the nerve?”

“It’s called
chutzpah
. My people are born
with it.”

“You must have been born a week late, because you’ve
got twice as much as everybody else. What do you want?”

“Let’s say I’m investigating a
murder. . .” I began, but Barry put his head on his desk
and began banging his forehead on the desktop. “You want to cut
that out? It’s distracting me.”

“Didn’t you learn anything from the last time? You
damn near got yourself killed.” Barry stopped the forehead move,
but kept his head on the desk. His voice echoed from under the
desk, around his feet.

“This is different,” I told him. “I’m not anywhere
near the killer this time. This murder took place in D.C.”

“Washington, D.C.? Our nation’s capital?”

“That was a question on the Police Chief exam,
wasn’t it, Barry? Yeah, that Washington, D.C. Now, the question is,
how do you investigate a crime long-distance? I mean, I’m a good
250 miles away from the scene, and I don’t want to move down there
for however long it takes. What can I do?”

Barry sat back up and leaned back in his chair,
thinking.

“Well, I assume you’ve already talked to the
Washington cops.”

“Yeah.”

“What you want to do now is find out as much on the
Internet about the victim as you can. Who he was. . . it
was a man, right?” Barry asked.

“Louis Gibson.”

“Oh, that People for Family Values, or whatever,
guy? How’d you get on that one?”

I told him.

“I guess everybody you go to school with can’t be as
classy as you are,” Barry said.

“Well, how many people are as classy as me?”

“I was thinking of it from Gibson’s point of view,
actually.”

“You’re funny. You should go into stand-up comedy.
But wear the gun belt. If they don’t laugh, you can shoot
them.”

Barry smiled a little. He’ll deny it, but he did.
“Well, a high-profile case like that will be all over the Net. Find
out what you can, and talk to your friend with the chest about
motive. You say she acknowledges he was cheating on her?”

“Yeah, but Stephanie had already driven up here by
the time he was killed.”

“She could have paid somebody to do it,” Barry said.
“That happens. We had a rabbi right here in Jersey convicted of
just that.”

“I remember something about that,” I admitted.

Barry chuckled. “Now,
that’s
chutzpah,” he
said.

B
arry promised to smooth
things over with Mr. Rebinow at the Kwik’N EZ, and let me go on my
own recognizance, but not without threatening to kick me in the
recognizance if I threw any more stink bombs near open food.

When I got home, sure enough, there was a fax from
Lt. McCloskey of the Washington, D.C. Police Department, detailing
how he had nothing to say in the Louis Gibson case. Also, on the
answering machine was one of the sources for my
Star-Ledger
story, but when I called him back, he was out to lunch. It was
going to be one of those days.

I called Stephanie at home in D.C., and she took the
call right away. “Louis’ funeral is tomorrow,” she said. “They’re
actually talking about televising it on C-SPAN. Can you
imagine?”

“Price of fame, Steph.”

“I bet the President will show up. And here’s me
with nothing to wear.”

“That’ll make an impression,” I said.

She chuckled. “You always could make me laugh,
Aaron.”

“That’s not how I remember it, Steph. Not to change
the subject, but we need to have a long talk about Legs. I need a
lot of background before I go nosing around into
what. . . happened.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem. I’m coming back up
there over the weekend to deal with Louis’ family. Maybe we can get
together for lunch on Friday.”

We made the date, and chatted for a few minutes
before Steph’s larger task—planning a nationally televised funeral—
intruded on her, and she called our conversation quits.

I spent a couple of hours after that on the
Internet, which has completely replaced the library as the
freelance writer’s main site for research. One of the few luxuries
I allow myself is a high-speed cable Internet connection, and it
pays for itself in time spent waiting for pages to pop onto the
screen. I’d sooner give up my thesaurus—I could always download
one, after all.

Through various web sites, I gained the following
information:

Louis Gibson was an attorney who founded People for
American Values in 1992—

Louis Gibson once told an interviewer he was
“appalled at the degradation of American values by the excesses and
mistakes of the 1960’s”—

Louis Gibson and his wife, Stephanie Jacobs Gibson,
had been “happily married” for 23 years, and had two children,
Louis Gibson, Jr., now 22 and a senior at Georgetown University,
and Jason Gibson, now 17 and a junior at the Pringley School in
Annapolis, MD—

Louis Gibson regularly appeared on such television
programs as
Meet the Press, Sunday Morning, Larry King Live;
and
The O’Reilly Factor
. On his last TV appearance, on
Left of Center
, he had gotten into a shouting match with the
host, Estéban Suarez.

I belong to an Internet bulletin board for writers
called Writers United for Stage and Screen (WUSS), which was
started by four disgruntled screenwriters about 10 years ago. Since
the only kind of screenwriter is the disgruntled kind, WUSS is now
populated by 250 professional and semi-professional screenwriters
(like me), who leave messages for each other.

One of the great advantages of WUSS is the vast
depth of knowledge that members can tap. If you need to know about
the migrating patterns of Canadian geese, the caliber of the most
widely circulated gun in America, the lyricist of “Do Wah Ditty
Ditty,” or the perfect way to cook lamb chops, there’s always
somebody to ask.

I logged on that morning and read my messages for
the day— there were two. One was from Margaret Fishman, a
screenwriter and novelist who wanted to know if New Jersey really
had more Mafia members per square mile than any other state. The
other was from Gene Manelli, a comedy writer with some fringe
credits, which put him a few rungs up the ladder from me. Gene was
continuing a thread of conversation that between the two of us had
degenerated into a war of puns. Don’t ask me to detail it— you’d
wake up screaming for weeks.

I left a message addressed to “ALL.” It read:
“Anyone with info about the recently deceased conservative lobbyist
Louis Gibson, please get in touch privately. There’s no money in it
(for YOU), but it will be greatly appreciated.”

Once that was done, I logged off the Net and made
yet another follow-up phone call on the
Star-Ledger
story.
This time, I actually got the person I needed, spent 25 minutes
asking questions I didn’t entirely understand, and wrote down
answers I didn’t understand at all. Hey, it’s a living.

That left one more interview for the article, and I
was awaiting a callback on that one. I decided to concentrate on
the “Case of the Stinky Bomb.”

Every year, the Parent Teacher Organization (PTO,
not PTA, so they don’t have to pay dues) of Midland Heights
publishes what it calls “Find-A-Friend,” the list of every child in
the school district (who sends in a form at the beginning of the
school year), with address, phone number, and parents’ names. This
year, it was rumored, email addresses (for the kids!) would be
added, but since it was only October, the Find-A-Friend for this
year hadn’t come out yet. The book is a resource so central to a
family’s life it can often supplant the local phone book, and
missing this year’s edition would be a major handicap.

Luckily, there was last year’s. I picked it up off
the shelf on my desk (the Find-A-Friend is rarely far from my
grasp) and started leafing through the pages, hoping to be hit on
the head with the names of kids who might perpetrate such a
dastardly crime.

I don’t like to sound callous about it, but the fact
is, if you live in a small community long enough, and your children
go to the public schools, you pretty much know which kids are more
likely to flout authority, and which ones are going to play by the
rules or die. So, while I’ll admit that this was a fishing
expedition of the worst kind, it was not a witch hunt.

Besides, I had nothing to go on.

And after a good long look at pretty much every name
in the Midland Heights school system, I had compiled a list of
eight extreme long shots. In other words, I still had a grand total
of nothing to go on. But I had killed an hour, and in freelance
writing school, they teach that an hour killed is never a bad
thing. Especially if you’ve avoided paying work.

I started in on the third act of the mystery
screenplay. Screenwriting, for those of you sensible enough never
to have tried it, is traditionally done in three acts. And the acts
are defined in no better terms than those of Julius Epstein, who,
with his brother Philip and Howard Koch, wrote a little picture
called
Casablanca
that you might have seen, so he should
know.

“In the first act,” Epstein said, “your main
character gets caught up a tree. In the second act, people come out
and throw rocks at him. And in the third act, he gets down out of
the tree.”

So my bogus Aaron Tucker stand-in, Andy Trainor (I
had to make the characters “less ethnic” to appeal to Hollywood),
had already gotten himself up a tree by agreeing to investigate a
crime. And various people had thrown rocks at him, mostly by
threatening his life and cutting off his source of income. I’d even
thrown in a chase scene to make producers happy. Now, in Act 3, it
was time to get Andy out of the tree.

He’d started to climb down off his branch when my
phone rang. As usual, the end of the screenplay was the easiest
part for me to write, because I’d already gotten up a head of steam
writing the first two acts, and because I’d been thinking about the
ending all along. Of course, in this case, it was easier than ever,
since I had reality to use as a template, so I was typing fast
enough to elicit smoke from the keys. But I took a breath between
sentences to reach for the phone.

The guttural voice on the other end spoke quickly,
but clearly enough for me to understand. “Back off, man,” it said.
Then it hung up.

Stunned, it took me a minute. Then, I scrolled all
the way up to the beginning of my second act, when Andy first runs
into trouble from outside. And I changed the mysterious phone
caller’s dialogue from “stop your investigation,” to “back off,
man.”

A
bby looked at me wearily.
“A threatening phone call, Aaron? We’re not starting
that
again, are we?”

“Beats me. I haven’t done anything the other
reporters writing about Legs didn’t try. In fact, I’m sure I
haven’t done as much as most of them.” I flipped over the chicken
filet I was frying in the pan. “I wonder if Dan Rather is also
getting terse, anonymous phone calls.”

“I heard on NPR that Gibson’s funeral is going to be
covered live on CNN tomorrow,” Abby said, taking out an earring. In
a minute, she’d go upstairs to change out of her work clothes and
into exercise clothes. “The President is showing up.”

“Which begs the question of whether Stephanie will
be naked or not.”

She stopped. “Huh?”

“Don’t worry about it,” I told my wife. “Don’t worry
about anything.”

“That’s hard to do,” she said, walking out of the
kitchen, “when the phone calls are starting again.”

“All he said was ‘back off, man,’” I had to raise my
voice to reach her. “It might have been Bart Simpson.”