As Dog Is My Witness (24 page)

“
Y
ou’d have been so proud
of your son yesterday,” I told Abby that night as we were finding
the bed under the pile of laundry I’d dumped there.

I’m the person who stays home most of the time, and I
do the laundry in my family. I realize I’m supposed to be somehow
ashamed of this strike against my manhood, but the truth is, I
don’t mind doing the laundry for the family. In fact, I kind of
like doing the laundry for the family, and can’t figure out how, in
the modern age, this is somehow thought of as a feminine function.
We have washing machines and automatic dryers, don’t we? What are
guys better at than playing with machines?

The part I don’t like is folding the damn laundry
after it comes out of the dryer, and putting the newly clean
clothes away. So I tend to leave the whole pile on our bed, and put
it off until the last minute, which is when Abby and I are ready to
get into said bed. This forces the issue, and on more occasions
than not, prompts my wife to help me fold. Since there is no
machine involved, folding, in my opinion, is a unisex activity.

“Really?” she said, forcing me back on topic. “He’d
make a good reporter, you think?”

“I don’t know about that, since I’ve read his English
homework,” I said. “He writes good poetry, which I could never do,
but his prose is, let’s say, uninspired. What I’m saying is that he
exhibited excellent investigative skills, and
people
skills,
that you wouldn’t have expected.”

“I wouldn’t have expected
any
people skills,”
Abby answered honestly. Perhaps this is the place to note we try to
be as clear-eyed and objective about our children, and particularly
Ethan, as we can be.

“I don’t know if it’s all the social skills
training,” I said, trying to match some of the four million
athletic socks in all sizes that had taken over my sleeping area,
“but he assessed the situation, asked the important questions, and
got answers I might not have gotten. I don’t know if it’s because
he’s a cute twelve-year-old boy . . . 

“A
gorgeous
twelve-year-old boy,” my wife
corrected. Okay, so we’re
mostly
clear-eyed and
objective.

“. . .  but Karen Huston really took
him seriously. And I really don’t think Justin Fowler cared if
Ethan was
gorgeous
or not.”

Aha! Two socks with the same stripes! But they were
different sizes. Curse you, Hanes Hosiery!

“You think maybe we could start buying distinctive
socks for each family member, so I can tell the difference between
my socks and Ethan’s?” I asked.

“What difference does it make?” Abby said. “They’re
all clean. Divide them up equally and take half.”

I chose not to comment on such a revolting
suggestion, and went on. “Anyway, I was impressed, and I told him
so,” I said.

“I’m still not comfortable with you involving Ethan
in this story,” Abby said, successfully pairing up three matching
pairs without even breathing hard. “You’ve already been abducted
once. And there were those three men. Thank goodness they haven’t
come back.”

If I didn’t correct her, I would have been party to a
direct lie, and I can’t do that to Abby with any real conviction—or
hope of keeping all my body parts intact. “There’s something I
haven’t told you . . .  I began.

Immediately, she turned from the Spider-Man t-shirt
she was folding, her eyes narrowing. “What?” she asked. So I told
her about the subsequent sighting of the Three Unwise Men, and the
conversation I’d had with Big.

“What is it we’re supposed to need protection
from
?” she asked when I was finished, her voice barely under
control.

“I have no idea,” I told her honestly. “They wouldn’t
tell me. Personally, I think it’s just Shapiro’s way of keeping an
eye on me. I can’t think of anyone else who might be coming after
me.”

She gave me an Abby stare. “You should have told
me.”

“I
did
tell you. I just waited a day until I
did.”

“Nice tap dancing.”

“And they say we Jewish men have no rhythm,” I told
her. She made a face at me.

We’d finally completed the folding, and had organized
the laundry into four piles, one for each family member. I had
drawn the line at doing Howard’s laundry, although the suggestion
had been made implicitly.

I took my pile, which consisted mostly of socks and
underwear, and stored it in the three-drawer bachelor’s chest on my
side of the bed. Abigail stashed her considerably more eclectic
stack in the Ikea armoire I’d assembled for her. Storage space in
Midland Heights is a commodity just a hair less precious than a
1951 Mickey Mantle rookie baseball card.

The children’s clothing piles were taken off our bed
and placed on the floor, to be distributed in the morning. With
that done, we were finally ready to actually climb into bed, which
we did.

“I don’t like it when you keep things from me that
could be dangerous,” Abby said as she turned off the light over her
head.

“I don’t know what to do about it,” I said. “I have
no idea what the danger is. What should I have told you—’watch out
for . . .  something?’ I’d sound like the guy in
charge of Homeland Security: ‘The threat level today is magenta.
Dress accordingly.’”

“Just promise me you’ll let me know when to wear the
Kevlar vest to work, okay?” Abby likes to stay fashion
conscious.

“It’ll look sexy on you, no matter what,” I told
her.

There was a long silence while my wife didn’t
laugh.

“Okay,” I said. “I promise.”

She reached out a hand and touched my arm, which on a
slow night can be enough for me. Suddenly, Abby was kissing me and
holding me close. “Come here,” she said.

I did, but not without the obligatory mock horror.
“But dear,” I said, “company’s in the house.”

“Screw ‘em,” she said.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’ve had a better offer.”

S
itting in a cold car on
Easton Avenue in New Brunswick, I couldn’t remember why I had
agreed to the Very Famous Plan in the first place. The idea of
turning the car off, so as to draw less attention, was Mahoney’s,
and the fact that his van was allowed to run its heater the whole
time I was freezing various useful parts of my anatomy off was not
warming my heart, or for that matter, my right hand, either.

“Be a man,” Mahoney taunted me from his cell phone.
“Live with a little adversity.”

“Easy for you to say,” I reminded him. “You’re in the
warm glow of a large, heated vehicle. I’m living like a homeless
man, but without seventeen layers of clothing.”

The target vehicle, which Mahoney had finished
repairing ten minutes ago, was a late model Chevrolet Cavalier, the
very definition of Generic Car. It had suffered an electrical
problem that disabled not only its ignition, but also its power
windows, which had left the driver with his window down while
waiting for the rental crew to pick him up before the repair. At
this moment, I could sympathize.

“You’ve had it far too easy for far too long,”
Mahoney continued. “You never even commute out of your house.”

I was looking at Thomas Sweets, the ice cream parlor
on Easton that under normal circumstances would be, for me, an
absolute haven. “Mr. Sweets,” as it’s known at my house, makes the
best chocolate chip cookie ice cream in the universe. A shame you
couldn’t put it on a Sonny Amster bagel, but there are limits.
Anyway, at that moment, the thought of ice cream was just making me
colder.

“For someone who never leaves the house,” I told him,
“I’ve been following you around in a decrepit minivan an awful lot
lately.”

“Welcome to the real world, pal,” he said.

“If this is the real world, can I go back to the
Matrix? I think I took the wrong pill.”

This hilarity threatened to go unchecked until a late
model Honda Civic approached the Chevy, and the single occupant got
out to open the hood.

“He’s here,” I told Mahoney as quickly as I
could.

“On my way,” he said.

Grateful to the intruder, I started the minivan,
flooding its interior with, um, slightly less frigid air (I had
been meaning to get Mahoney to take a look at the heater). In a
flash, I had taken another sip of my recently hot chocolate and
watched intently. My part in the Very Famous Plan at this point was
to sit tight and watch. Which had also been my part up until now,
so I was getting good at it.

Within seconds, Mahoney pulled the van, which he had
parked around the corner, back onto Easton. The street, a main drag
near the Rutgers College campus, was crowded at eleven in the
morning, but he quickly managed to get close to the rental car and
cut off the tormentor’s chance of escape. That was Mahoney’s role
in the Very Famous Plan.

But before he could get out of the van and confront
the saboteur, the Mole took option B, which we had outlined during
the Very Famous Planning.

He looked, saw Mahoney, and decided to abandon the
car. In other words, he just ran away.

Mahoney gave me a nod and put the van into gear. He
followed the Mole around the corner onto Somerset Street, going
north toward College Avenue. My role now was to pull out of the
parking space I had near the Rutgers garage, past Noodle Gourmet,
and block the saboteur’s car so he couldn’t double back.

I pulled out, but was blocked by a student in a car
much fancier than mine, who was blasting rap music and talking on
his cell phone. His bumper sticker read, “Mean People Suck.”

Unable to go forward, I tried to back up, but had
parked in too tight a space to make it feasible. Meanwhile, just as
Mahoney had feared, the Mole got him to cross the street onto
Somerset, committing Mahoney to that direction, and then doubled
back on foot toward the rental car he had driven here.

I pulled back into my space while the traffic jam,
apparently caused by Mean People Man making a left turn off Easton
behind the rental, made it impossible for me to go forward in the
car. I leapt out of the car and headed on foot toward Mr.
Sweets.

Too late. The Mole had already made it to his rental
car and driven down Easton toward St. Peter’s Hospital. Mahoney
couldn’t back up and I couldn’t go forward. We had been
outpaced.

I stood in the street for a while, watching, until
Mahoney managed to complete a trip around the block and pull up in
the van. He lowered the driver’s side window and looked at me.

“I don’t really think this plan is going to be all
that famous,” he said.

“Don’t be so sure,” I told him. “They’re still
studying Napoleon at Waterloo.”

A
Star-Ledger
assignment had come in on Friday, so I made a couple of phone calls
after getting back from the Great Mole Chase Monday morning. Abby
was at her office three days before Christmas, since there was no
reason for us to care about the holiday. Everyone else was in the
house with me, a perfect environment in which to make business
phone calls.

After I had made the
Star-Ledger
calls
(nobody’s
ever
there the first time you call them), I
decided to look into a couple of things regarding the Justin Fowler
story because freelancers are always on the lookout for ways to
prolong the agony.

First, I called Justin’s lawyer, who worked for the
public defender in Middlesex County, and had a caseload
approximating the number of bricks in the Empire State Building. J.
Bernard Tyson, who was covering up a first name somehow worse than
“Bernard,” was, counter to stereotype, not fresh out of law school
and idealistic. In fact, he was in his early fifties, and seemed to
have eaten a breakfast consisting of sour grapes, rotten eggs, and
crow.